A successful YouTube channel is a fantastic asset for B2B businesses. Video content gives business owners a prime opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, increase their visibility, and draw in new clients.
Dan Leeman, co-founder of Automation Helpers, runs a popular YouTube channel that achieves precisely these goals. In his videos, he guides viewers towards automating their businesses using industry-leading tools. And generates leads for Automation Helpers’ services.
Here is his journey as an entrepreneur, and how he built an engaged audience and turned his YouTube channel into one of the prime ways new clients find his company.
Quick Facts
- Dan Leeman is the co-founder of Automation Helpers, a B2B company that helps companies automate workflows through portals, integrations, and apps.
- He runs a popular YouTube channel on business automation, showcasing his expertise – and his team’s.
- In his content, he shares best practices for using Airtable and other low-code applications, creating integrations through Zapier, and configuring other software.
Keep reading for the full story!
For this series of blog posts, we sat down with some of the most successful creators at Tasty Edits. Here, they share their experience and expertise with you.
Contents
From Big Tech Job to Entrepreneurship
Leeman’s inspiration for Automation Helpers was born of a passion for helping small- and medium-sized businesses. He decided to focus on this passion, after years of working in Big Tech.
“I worked in sales and professional services at large tech companies for years,” he recalls. “I worked at a chatbot company – in the phase before chatbots were cool. This was pre-ChatGPT. We got acquired, and I went from working in a company of 70 people to a 7,000-person organization. It was then that I realized that I wanted to help smaller businesses again – to take things to the next level.”
YouTube provided the perfect medium for that.
“I had an old YouTube channel called PyPros,” Leeman explains. “I was creating Python content as a fun little side hustle. But I was working a lot with business applications, so I decided to create content around these things that I knew really well. That was in the fall of 2022.”
Following this inspiration, Leeman created several videos around Airtable, a popular no-code tool. Only a month later, someone reached out to him, for help with their own Airtable setup.
Leeman’s first Airtable video on his channel.
“At first, I thought: ‘Sure, I’ll do a little bit of moonlighting’. But just a month or two later, I had so many clients that I knew I either had to quit my job in Big Tech or shut down what I’m doing,” he recalls. “That was the moment I knew there was no way I could look back and say: ‘What if’? So I decided to make a go of it.”
Transforming a Coding Tutorial Channel Into a Business Asset
Automation Helpers was born in summer 2023, only half a year after Leeman started taking on clients who had found him through his YouTube channel. Bringing on co-founders allowed him to keep working on the marketing side of the business, focussing on YouTube.
“In our first year, we were able to scale to a million dollars of revenue,” Leeman says. “Currently, our team consists of 25 people, operating in different capacities. And there is no slowing down. I tie all of this into the YouTube side of things.”
Looking back, Leeman believes that the engaged audience, and the reputation he built through his YouTube presence is key to the success of his company:
“I have found no better path to building credibility than when you are talking to someone through your camera and you are helping them solve their problem. It’s such a natural way of making a personal connection – and you’re helping someone improve something in their business. That’s how we can generate 70 leads a month.”
Leeman’s introduction to Zapier automation workflows.
Scaling Up YouTube Through Outsourcing
This organic path through his YouTube channel led Leeman to heading one of the fastest-growing no-code agencies out there.
However, en route, he had to overcome the same challenge as other content creators – how to scale up their content production while keeping a high video quality.
Outsourcing video editing was a key step, Leeman explains: “I’m a business owner who does consulting. I’m never gonna spend hours and hours in a video editing application. So I just needed something that would quickly, roughly get the job done.”
The kicker: “My time is more valuable than what we’d be investing into the editing.”
After a rocky start with an editor who struggled to follow instructions and produce consistent results, Leeman switched to Tasty Edits as a video editing company, and achieved what he’d been hoping for.
Leeman’s recent guide on automating Google tasks.
“Once we had one or two drafts under our belt, it was as if our video editor could suddenly read my brain. We would put a video together and it would suddenly turn into a one-draft publish. That saved me about 25% of my time. It feels like we’re operating on all cylinders here.”
Thanks largely to Leeman’s consistent, high-quality content output and engaged audience, Automation Helpers is on track to double its profits this year.
“We’re probably going to hit two million or more,” Leeman says. “It has been a really organic path – probably 80% of our revenue is driven by YouTube.”
FAQs
Dan Leeman is the co-founder of Automation Helpers and a popular YouTube content creator.
On YouTube, Dan Leeman demonstrates how businesses can automate their workflows using industry-leading low-code tools. This is also what the company he co-founded, Automation Helpers, specializes in.
Automation Helpers is a B2B company that helps companies automate through portals, integrations, and apps.
If you’re interested in how to automate your business, Dan Leeman is the best channel for you. It features a wide variety of content on how to create automation workflows, using platforms like Zapier, low-code and no-code applications, and Airtable.
