Toby Hendy has attracted 1 million subscribers over her 10+ year journey as a YouTube creator. Along the way, she’s started and left a PhD program, collaborated with VSauce3 and Veritasium, and participated in the YouTube gameshow Jet Lag. 

Her math and science channel, Tibees, features Toby explaining logarithms in the style of Bob Ross, reviewing a Mensa IQ test, and explaining the fourth dimension.

“I'm proud that I've made a niche for myself within science YouTube,” Toby says. "I'm not the  loudest or most outgoing or most theatrical person, but I'm happy that I've still managed to find a space within my personality.”

I spoke to Toby to talk about her creative process, from brainstorming to pressing publish. Here are some takeaways.

Brainstorming ideas

Toby never sits down to brainstorm. Instead ideas come as she reads or watches other YouTube videos. “It doesn't have to be a science video,” she says, “it could be commentary, lifestyle, or book reviews. And often when I'm watching those videos I will think I could do something like this but for maths.” She then dutifully adds it to her ideas list.

“The ideas list is an unstoppable moving object,” she says. She estimates it currently has over 200 entries in a Google Sheet.

Picking ideas

“Sometimes it feels obvious what idea to do next, like I'll read through the list and one will just really jump out to me of like, oh my god, I need to do that because no one else has done it yet and I, you know, I don't want someone else to make that first.”

Toby stresses throughout the conversation that she picks ideas that excite her.

I asked Toby how much stock she puts into SEO and competitor research for filtering out topics. She thinks it can be valuable for some channels, but isn’t helpful for hers. “I have an internal sense for some of this stuff, a kind of a feeling for what might perform well,” she says. Part of that she attributes to her living and breathing science and math content for so long. 

Writing

Toby doesn’t write full scripts. She writes out technical explanations and small moments in her script, but most of it is driven by a bullet-point outline. Within the structure, she uses a few rules.

“I try not to have overly long intros or conclusions. And so that's one of the things where if I'm looking at my bullet point script and I see a whole bunch of bullet points in the like intro of the script I'm like, no, I don't really need all of these.”

Ultimately, when sorting through the mountains of relevant information and data, Toby uses a simple rule to keep her scripts lean.

“The rule would probably be continuously asking myself, ‘do I actually care about this thing that I'm planning to add into the video?’”

Filming

Teleprompters are one of the best investments newer creators can make (in my humble opinion). But Toby eschews them entirely, allowing her to be more authentic on camera.

“I tend to just have that script I mentioned printed out or even written in a notepad,” she says. “I'll edit out the parts where I'm looking at the notepad, trying to remember what I want to say.”

This process requires Toby to film multiple takes for each small section of her script. As she iterates, her delivery gets better and better, until she’s able to do a full read-through more more seamlessly. One rule she commits to: she will re-record until she has two good takes. Part of this is driven by the noisy Australian birds that constantly interrupt her filming.

Editing

With her many takes, Toby uses the remove retakes feature in Descript to get her last (and usually best) take of a line. After doing a first editing pass in Descript, she exports her project so that she can easily finalize it in other editing software.

Toby also wants her videos to work for people who have them on in the background, and may not be looking at the screen at all. 

“That comes into the editing and the writing, [and] filming process to make sure I'm not continuously saying ‘look at this cool thing on the screen!’” That doesn’t mean she avoids graphics, but instead tries to make everything verbally clear.

How to balance creativity with the algorithm

I also asked Toby how she balances “the algorithm” with her creative process. Many creators are encouraged to do extensive SEO research, competitor analysis, and structure their videos to maximize retention.

“Some of these ideas on how to optimize content, I think that they can be valuable,” she says. “Not in the sense of blindly following random rules that you heard some guru say, but more in the sense of using them to understand what people actually want to watch and what good content looks like.”

Toby, notably, doesn’t do “retention editing,” which emphasizes very fast cuts. It doesn’t suit her style. But she finds some value in the message its evangelists are ultimately conveying.

“Never waste your audience’s time,” for one. Having quick and concise intros is another common point, one I’ve personally stressed. “I don't do really, really snappy intros,” she says. “But hearing people talk about that has changed my mind on having reasonably brief intros instead of a 10-minute intro.”

“Ultimately what I'm trying to do here, and I think what everyone should be trying to do here, is making videos that people actually want to watch. That often starts with making a video that you yourself as the creator would want to watch.”

Advice to new creators

“When it comes to really new channels, I think the most common mistake is making videos that they themselves wouldn't actually watch. It sounds obvious,” Toby says. “It's really easy to fall into this trap where you think ‘That what will be popular’ and in the process you end up making something you don’t even like.”

“If you want to enjoy this long-term and have success long-term, coming up with your own ideas and showing off your own creativity is more important.”

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.