Noob here, trying to improve ganking early game

Heyo! So I just started playing this game about a week ago and I am currently lvl 21. I'm trying to get decent at jungling (I main Kindred) so that when I eventually go into ranked I don't get flamed for being bad/drag the whole game down. I've looked on Mobafire for some guides and stuff, and I usually play blind pick 5v5 unranked. A usual early game for me goes like this:

I buy hunter's machete and a refillable potion, and go get red with my adc/mid/top laner. After that I cross through mid, maybe take a few cs in order to get halfway to lvl 3, ward the river, then usually go and pressure mid or something for a few seconds while smite cools down. Then I go for the gromp (I've tried attacking raptors and got slaughtered) and use that to reach lvl 4. By then my mark will be on one of the scuttlecrabs, so I head down there at get it really quick, then back and get skirmisher's sabre if I have enough. By then I'll be around 4 and a half, and that's when I start to look for ganks. I'll have my q, w, and e ready, and I usually try a tactic where I have a laner try and bait the enemy towards the tower, then I come in from behind and w q e them while my laner catches up and we kill them together. However that doesn't usually work because by then the laner's like lvl 5/6 and also just barely escapes under tower with around 20 health. That leads me to fall behind because I'm not getting any kills and/or get killed myself. I try to get some jungle camps but by around 7 minutes I'm already a level or two behind and losing my early cs lead. Eventually mid-late game the enemy laners get fed and I can't do anything to stop them, then eventually become feed later on. If I try and gank mid-late game the enemy laner will either plow through me, escape with half-health, or 2v1. Is there something I'm missing? I really want to improve my game so that I don't become a liability to my team. My usualy kda looks something like 5/10/10, or 7/9/12, just under 2.

I did manage to gank successfully early game twice, and that ended up with me carrying the team going 23/3/9 and 17/3/2. I didn't really play differently those times, the only difference was that I was able to pull some ganks off.

Thanks!