A small café with a line out the door every Saturday is a bigger success than a big one with empty tables.

Size is the easiest thing to see and one of the worst measures of how something is doing. A small place people genuinely want to be in is healthy; a large one nobody comes to is a problem wearing a bigger coat. Capacity is not the same as demand. The real question is whether people choose you, not how much room you happen to have.

Judge whatever you are building by whether anybody comes back rather than by how big it looks. Count your regulars, your repeat readers, the friends who turn up twice. If that number is rising, you are doing better than you think.