The big mo keeps rolling.
Momentum, that is. SciFact hasn’t acquired a large gentleman called Maurice. Although there might be a future animated character in that :).
The week-two board pack is ready (scroll down for the slides). The board remains me, my wife and our one-year-old, and there’s more to be excited about: more views, more comments and signs that some people are coming back.
There’s also a slightly less glamorous development, more arduous, and distinctive un-Andy…
I need a routine.
Another week, another little hit
Last week, I wrote about the excitement of seeing people respond to something I’d made. That hasn’t worn off.
The week-two report records 67,459 views across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, compared with 51,026 in the first report. Up about 32%.
YouTube contributed 36,255 views and Instagram 29,377. Both grew. TikTok went the other way, falling from 4,990 to 1,827.
So the overall direction is pleasing, but there are things to understand underneath it.
The usual small print applies: these are views, rather than different people, and they include views on older videos. YouTube’s week runs from 5–11 October; Instagram and TikTok cover the seven days between the reporting snapshots on 7 and 14 October. Even the first reporting windows weren’t identical.
I’m happy to enjoy the progress without pretending this is a perfectly controlled experiment.
YouTube also added another 95 net subscribers, taking the total since launch to 202. Comments rose from 77 in the first report to 114.
Those are still small numbers in the grand scheme of the internet.
They don’t feel small when it’s your thing.
Week two is already week three
There’s a slightly strange time problem with these updates.
You launch. A week passes. You review it.
By the time you’re writing about week one, you’re already doing week two. This week-two review arrives while I’m working through week three, and most of my headspace is somewhere in weeks four, five and six.
The report is looking backwards. The work is happening now. The ideas are already wandering off ahead.
Which is why routine has become a big thing for me this week.
The launch had that lovely burst of energy: an idea, a creative direction, enough tools to make it happen and an urge to get it out into the world.
Keeping it going means repeatedly finding questions worth answering, working out an inviting way into them, getting the videos produced and making sure they reach people.
The week-two pack records 74 new YouTube Shorts, with mostly the same videos shared to Instagram and TikTok. That’s a lot of questions, explanations and little creative decisions.
I still find it exciting. I also need a rhythm that helps me keep doing it.
Brainstorming needs a place in the week. Production needs a place. So does checking what happened after I pressed publish.
Turns out the next episode doesn’t make itself merely because I’m enthusiastic about having a channel.
The comments need a routine too
Some of the nicest things in this week’s pack are things people have said.
One viewer wrote:
“This channel oddly comforts me”
I love that.
SciFact started with the idea of soft, playful ways into a subject. Someone finding comfort in it feels connected to what I wanted to make.
Another comment said:
“finally a video that really explains it the way i can understand”
That viewer appeared on two different Shorts. There’s something particularly pleasing about recognising that someone has encountered the channel more than once and is still joining in.
Responding to those people is part of the work.
There are questions to answer, suggestions to think about and conversations to continue. I want to give that attention rather than let it become something I squeeze in whenever I happen to notice a notification.
The viewer-question videos are getting watched too. The report shows more than a thousand views each for the vinyl and CD explainers, with the car air conditioning video close behind.
That gives me a reason to keep listening. People are helping me find questions I can do something with.
The £15 experiment that ate two evenings
There have been frustrations as well.
I tried to boost a video on Instagram. Just £15, to see what would happen.
A small experiment. Modest ambitions.
It ended up taking two evenings, and I still didn’t manage to get it working.
So I can’t tell you whether £15 of promotion helped SciFact reach a useful audience. I can tell you that trying to arrange it used up rather more of my time than I intended.
That belongs in this update too.
It’s easy to show a chart going upwards. The chart doesn’t show the evenings spent trying to get a fairly ordinary task to work.
But those evenings are part of building the thing. They affect your energy, your time and what else you manage to do.
I wanted a little advertising experiment. I got an administrative subplot.
My AI agents would like to change the creative
The board pack comes with recommendations from my AI agents.
This week, they want changes to the openings: rework the first second on five Shorts and try an opening specifically for TikTok.
There’s evidence behind the suggestion. The report puts engaged views for the new YouTube Shorts at 35.5%, compared with 37.1% for the previous batch. On one TikTok video about retro games, 65% of viewers had gone within a second.
That’s worth paying attention to.
I’m still not sure about changing the creative.
I’ve come to like it the way I like it. The pace, the feeling, the way somebody is invited into the explanation. There’s a character to these videos that I’m attached to.
That isn’t me declaring that everything is perfect. Or that I’ll never change it.
But not yet. 🙂
I want to understand what I’d be changing and why. Would a different opening help someone find their way into the video? Would it preserve the feeling I’m trying to create? Would I be making a better introduction, or simply a louder one?
Those are creative decisions. The numbers can help me ask the questions, but I still have to make the decisions.
Last week I wrote about being led by insight. I haven’t abandoned that because another spreadsheet has arrived.
And one recommendation didn’t happen
There’s an awkward little line in the review of last week’s proposed changes.
The recommendation was to reduce TikTok publishing to one to three posts a day.
The week-two report records 72 posts.
The verdict in the deck is wonderfully direct: “Not done.”
Fair enough.
I can’t claim to have tested a lower posting frequency when I haven’t actually done it. And I can’t use this week’s results to decide whether that proposed change worked.
It’s another reason the routine matters. A recommendation in a presentation needs to become an actual decision, then an actual part of the work, before there’s anything meaningful to review.
Some recommendations I’m questioning. This one simply wasn’t carried through.
Both belong in the account.
Still excited. Getting into a rhythm.
Week two has given me plenty to feel good about.
More people are watching. Some are returning. Questions are turning into videos. Someone finds the channel comforting, which is a lovely thing to hear about something you’ve made.
It’s also brought the work of keeping it going into sharper focus: finding a routine, making time for the community, dealing with frustrating bits of administration and deciding which advice deserves action.
This is exactly the point of #buildingInPublic for me.
I want to show the progress and the work around it. The decisions I’m making, the things I haven’t managed and the recommendations I’m still arguing with.
The big mo keeps rolling.
Now I’m working out a routine that can keep up with it.
You can watch SciFact on YouTube. And if you’re building something yourself—or have thoughts on any of this—come and find me on LinkedIn or X. I’d love to compare notes.