As I start a live video show, I feel just as lost as I felt 12 years ago

When I launched this website 12 years ago, I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with it. As I’m going through another startup — a YouTube show called David McElroy Live — I remember how lost I felt when I started here.

Tom Briscoe had done political cartoons — very good ones — for a newspaper I had owned many moons ago. In early 2011, we got together for lunch to catch up after not seeing each other for a long time. Tom told me that I really needed to start a website to put my writing online.

I was intrigued, but the idea also scared me. What would I write about? What if nobody ever read what I wrote? Would I be humiliated if I failed?

With Tom’s help, I got my site set up. The first things I wrote were awful. I had no audience. I had no concept for what I was trying to do. I averaged 66 page views a day during that month. I was afraid I’d never find an audience or a niche that made sense.

Now I’m starting a live YouTube show and I have the same fears.

I don’t have a clear concept of what I’m going to do. I’m afraid I won’t be interesting. I’m afraid I won’t be able to attract an audience. For the first time in a long time, I’m a clueless beginner once more.

At this point, I can’t imagine being concerned about what to write here or whether there would be an audience. I struggled for the first couple of months, but I found a niche and a lot of readers. After a few years, I made a major turn in another direction and found an entirely different audience.

When I feel my fears about not finding an audience and not being good enough as a video performer, I remind myself that my first efforts here were terrible. Even though it requires a lot of blind faith, I’m going to assume I’ll follow the same pattern on YouTube.

I assume my early shows won’t be very good. I assume I’ll have very little audience. I assume I’ll struggle with finding more than a very few viewers — and I assume I’ll want to quit.

But I’m trying to have faith that I’ll get better at performance with each show. I’m trying to believe that I’ll develop a style and a video presence that will help me attract viewers. I’m trying to have faith that things will happen that I can’t really predict or anticipate — that will suddenly make everything make sense with the new project. Because that’s what happened here.

A have a three-minute intro online, but that’s all. I don’t even have a launch date. I can’t tell you whether it will end up as a half-hour show or an hour or something else. I don’t know what the content will be. And those are the reasons why it feels scary.

It’s a well-known cliche to say that there are times when we have to leap and hope a net will appear. That’s what this one feels like. I’m taking a big leap — knowing it might be ugly in the beginning — and I’m trying to have faith that there will be a net to catch me when I need it most.

On my first month with this site, I sometimes had only a few dozen readers a day. By a couple of years later, I had thousands of readers every day. I hope I’ll be able to follow a similar pattern here — and I hope I’ll eventually be making a live show that might be worthy of your time.