How StandOut CV LTD CEO Andrew Fennell grew StandOut CV LTD to $360K revenue and 1K customers in 2025.

Founder background and what Standout CV does what it's doing monthly today on average. I think it's about 30k MR at the moment. Growing this business to 18 million visitors and over a million pounds of revenue. When I first started the website, what I was doing was reaching out to um a lot of small job websites and careers blogs. In the beginning, it was just me doing everything with a handful of freelance writers. Hey folks, my guest today is Andrew Fennel. You know, he reached out cold to me and I said, "Andrew, we have a huge wait list for the podcast. I'm only letting folks on that can actually share a screen, show proof of what they're doing, and are open to be transparent to teach my audience. And he said yes. So today you're going to learn, you're going to learn how he built his company, standout CV.com, right, which is a interview CV and online CV builder. Now, this is a very competitive space. So, you know, he has to be very good at SEO to win in this space. He's going to teach us how he's grown this business to 18 million visitors and over a million pounds of revenue. Andrew, you ready to take it to the top? Yes, thanks very much for having me. All right, so first off, when people visit CV, if they want to follow along, they might look at it and go, "Wait, this looks like a boring like resume application or something. Why did you pick this space?" Um, well, I I wouldn't say I really picked it. I guess it kind it it picked me in a weird way. So, um, prior to um, starting this website, I worked in recruitment for a few years. Um, but I was I never really liked it and I was always trying to start online businesses on the side. And I initially started um uh freelancing writing people's CVs for them. Um and then once we got a bit of traction, I started to get a few um clients through that. I started the website and initially was a a CV writing service um website. Um but basically over the um over the years it made more sense to move to uh an advertising uh From recruitment job to bootstrapped SaaS idea business model and then finally finally to an app. Interesting. Okay. So is can I view the app on my screen here somewhere or is it open? Yeah. Yeah. So you see the CV builder the in the in the top bar there or the or the Yeah, that be the app and that would take you to that and you can go to Craig CV now and you can essentially pick templates, change the colors, all that kind of thing. add pre-written content. Bing bing bing. Okay. What happens at the end? So, um once once you've built the full CV, um it will give you a preview of it and then um once you're happy with it, you can then pay to download it. So, it's initial uh just a a low price to have it for the first two weeks. And then if you want to uh keep it and have it to edit and use for more applications and tailor it, then it's um a it's a monthly um 16.95 per month. Why can't you fill all this in with AI? Why do I have to do so much work on the onboarding to get get to get it accurate? That's because we haven't got around to putting AI in it yet. So, um we're in the we're in the process of that at the moment. So, um it's you can you can add lots of pre-written content. Um but at the moment, we haven't plugged AI into it yet, but we are we're working on it. I see. Well, so why would people use this over just like exporting their LinkedIn profile? Um because so essentially the um there well there's a couple of reasons really. So firstly just the sheer amount of First customers from freelancing and SEO validation traffic we get through to the website and we we the the whole kind of ethos behind the site is we we put so much free and helpful info out there that we kind of build trust with people and then they come through to the um to the builder. Um and also and we guys we can look at that here. You know you guys know me. I don't like people just like say stuff on the show. I say back it up with data. So Andrew, I mean we can see here domain rating 73. Very very very strong domain rating. Yes. Organic traffic looks like about 60,000 per month, right? Yeah. It's a bit more than that. A ref is not always 100% accurate. It's about 110k at the moment. Um it was at its peak it was around about 300k. We've had sort of ups and downs over the last few years. Umformational content has taken a bit of a hit lately, but um we we still get plenty of traffic. and tell me about this specific STR. Actually, are you com just so we can I don't want to bury the lead. Are you comfortable sharing your Stripe revenue dashboard with us before you then reverse engineer and tell us how you built this company? Yeah, sure. Do you want me to share that now? Um, and guys, what I'm excited to learn more from Andrew here over the next 10 minutes. Again, the SEO play. I think he's like a one-man shop or a very small team. Again, bootstrapped. Uh, this is this is how you build real wealth. I'm right. I mean, full control. It's it's real wealth here. So, okay, we can see your Stripe revenue here, Andrew. So walk us through when you were at zero revenue, when did you launch and then where you're at today. Yeah. So um we so we launched the actual website around 10 years ago. Um as I said it was initially a CV writing

Early monetization

services, ads, then SaaS service. Um but what basically I quickly learned that um you know I think it was a typical thing of that you think you're going to get floods of traffic in when you create a website and then you realize you're not. Nothing comes in. Um, I played around with um with paid ads and um then I I I started to learn about SEO. Um and initially I I bought some like a a cheap SEO package from somebody on Fiverr or no actually on people per hour which is like an older um freelance site and then when I got the back links through I just realized that they were terrible um and that I had to do it myself basically. So then I I spent the next two to three years learning SEO, uh creating helpful content, building the right kind of back links. Um and it was a slow growth. Probably took a good year or so to um to really take off. C can you can you just cuz we can't see growth on here, right? Can you click view more maybe under the gross volume? Will that actually show us just Yeah. So annoyingly it's saying the graph won't load. Let me just um are these people paying you monthly recurring or do you have to get new sales every month from new customers? It's so it's it's a mixture. So it it is monthly recurring but uh the problem with like a careers based app like this is that obviously people don't stay around forever. So Mr. terms are fluctuate. So we do we do rely on new um new customers coming in. Okay. Let's focus on this screen for a second. Stay at the bottom if you're if you're comfortable doing this right. Yeah sure. Subscriber lifetime value $6743. It started off much lower than that like sub20. What did you do to increase the lifetime value over the past hover over that when the when the purple line was zero? Yeah, the bottom left. Basically, what we did with that is so initially I when I first started the app. Um, so when I had Well, Andrew, I want I want people to see the timeline, can you hover over

Pricing evolution

one-time fees to subscription MRR that line graph in the bottom left of your screen, subscriber lifetime value, and go down to where it's zero. Y Yeah. So over a little bit more, right to when it starts to go up. Right there. Yeah. So this was the purple line. Yeah. Yeah. So this was 2021. Yes. You start driving up lifetime value. So tell us how your pricing evolved over time to drive this up. Yeah. So essentially um I I had the app developed after we' after we'd built up revenue from advertising and I decided it was the right time to to build our own app. Um and the mistake I made in the beginning was that I didn't go with a monthly recurring plan, a subscription model. I I went with a onetime payment plan. Um and although that initially um attracted people, it didn't um it ruined uh subscriber lifetime value. basically people because people were buying once for £15 uh and then not coming back again. So um so basically we switched to a subscription model and that massively increased the uh the revenue. That's that's amazing. Let's go let's do the chart at the center top here. Subscriber turn rate. It spiked that above 40%. Could you just hover over that? The spike. Yeah. Yeah. So 44% in 2022. You've improved that drastically uh through to 2025. How did you improve that? Yeah. So nothing nothing in particular really just just continually improving the product really. So we um so when we first built it, it was kind of a a bare bones product and we only had one template and very basic features. Um and what we did is we put a survey if anybody ever for all customers that um Revenue model, MRR, LTV, and Stripe metrics breakdown canceled their subscription. Um we we put a quick survey up to ask them why they were canceling, what they didn't like about it, and what products they'd like to see. And then every month we would review that and we would pick the most um the most popular feature requests and add them. And that just helped us to to keep people on board for longer over time. Guys, remember I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com. And when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, "Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com." Interesting. Interesting. Okay, let's do trial conversion rate. A lot of people consider a good trial to paid conversion rate, especially like in consumer of like four or five%. Even some B2B, it's hard to get above like 5%. You're at 34%. Now, am I reading this right? That's 34% of of people that put in their email then convert to a paid plan. So no, it's like it's it's a conversion rate of people who go so we have an initial trial period of two weeks. So you pay £2.70 for your first two weeks and then you go if if you don't cancel in that period, you go on to the the full subscription, which is 16.95 a month. So that's people who convert from that from that very cheap paid trial into the full subscription. I see. So the cheap paid into full subscription. Okay. So may Okay, maybe

Biggest early challenge

learning SEO the hard way that's why it's a little bit higher, but still that feels like a really really good conversion rate. Before we go into your search performance, which is your top of funnel, are you comfortable sharing just total revenue you've collected life to date like all time? Yes, of course. Yeah. If I scroll up here, this this here is the total gross volume that we've um that we've generated uh with the app since creation, which is between what year and what year? That's in about four years. Cool. So between 20 sorry 2020 and 2025 done a million pounds. And is this you s so one? So I just like to say I actually do a lot of the link building myself still. Um but they they supplement it but very well. So, they're a company called Root Digital who are based here in the UK. Can you show me their website? I can indeed. And while that's loading, you mentioned you still do some of the link building yourself. What does that mean? A lot of people know you need link building, but you get these spam emails all the time from people saying, you know, we'd love for you to backlink to us in this last blog post. I delete every one of those emails. So, the people actually doing backlinking well. They're doing something creative. What are you doing? Yeah. So, should I shall I give you a bit of a run through of what I used to do when I first started and and now what I've kind of uh moved towards? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So, so link building is is probably one of the hardest parts of SEO. Um when I when I first started the website, what I was doing was reaching out to um a lot of small job websites and careers blogs and and mostly pitching guest posts. Um, and that still is a valid tactic, but it it's um it's not as success successful um anymore as Churn reduction using surveys and feature-driven retention it was back then, simply because so many people are doing it that websites are getting bit reluctant to it now. They find it spammy, so they don't they don't really want to engage in it. Um so it can can still get you some of the way, but what what we've moved to now are more um natural piece of uh good you useful pieces of content that naturally attract links. and that this is something really that root digital kind of taught me. Um, and I've haveve done some of myself as well. Um, but basically the the two kind of pillars of it are um digital PR. Can you show us an example by the way while you give the story? Yeah, I can indeed. Yep. So, let me just I'll give you uh we'll give you one of each. So, just go to Now guys, I'm going to give you the AHF numbers while you're seeing the front end, but I'm going to read you the HF. So, according to ah, this page that he that Andrew is sharing right now, uh, has 2,130 referring domains, 4,43 referring pages, and generates about a,000 organic clicks per month of free traffic to Andrew's tool. So, Andrew, why does it get so many backlinks? Sorry, which page is that, Nathan? That's what you're on right now. Just your stat. No, no, not your blog. Your forward slashstats page. Oh, the stats page. So, it says stats. It's like Sorry, let me job interview statistics. Which statistics? Sorry. Uh for it's it's your it's your URL. That's standoutc.coms job interview statistics. It's your stats page, not your blog. Okay. Yeah. No, that's a good one. Let me just um pull it up for you. Yeah. So, this is a good example. So, so this isn't digital PR. So, this is an example of what we call um a linkable asset or evergreen uh linkable content. Uh and essentially what this is is you collect uh data that is very important Improving LTV with subscriptions and product depth to journalists for a particular topic. So, this one this topic is obviously job interview stats in the UK. Uh just to give you an example, there's stats like 2% of candidates are selected to interview or the interview process usually takes five weeks. And what we do is we gather these stats from re reputable sources all across across across the internet. Um and we put them all in one place u and we title it something like job interview stats because that that's the kind of thing that journalists are looking for. Um, and if you if you do this properly, um, this content will rank naturally without having to do any outreach and you will attract a lot of links. Like you can see, this page has, uh, 335 referring domains, and that they're all natural links. And some of those links come from really big websites, news websites, uh, big, uh, big job websites in the UK and in the US as well. Most people think to get a good SEO page, it needs 6,000 words, but this article is only 1,035 words. So it's proof where if you structure this correctly, you don't have to go write a 6,000word sort of piece of long form anchor content. Yeah. No, that's that's right. So this this is just very data driven. So um that data is becoming very important in link building. I would say like that is it's the number one thing that we use. So that's that's an example of a linkable asset. And the other thing we do well the root do for us is digital PR. So they I'll give let me just quickly pull up the example. Okay. Okay. So the they did this for us. So this is how many people lie on their resume. So what digital PR does is they they create stories using data in your industry. So for this one they use a survey but they they sometimes will um Scaling with no employees and minimal operations get get data from public sources and analyze it. So, lots of different ways they can do it, but essentially here they um they surveyed I think a thousand people in the States asking them if they had ever lied on their resume, why they lied on their resume, if it helped them get their job, that kind of thing. Um, and then they go to press with the story. Um, and this did really well. So, this one has 212 referring domains and this had some really big um some really big pickups. So I think it got picked up by Entrepreneur, uh maybe CNN, uh a few a few of the big um US news sites. So how do you pay root for this? Is it a fixed fee per month or pay per backlink or how do you pay them? It's it's a fixed fee per month. Most agencies that you work with that do this kind of like high level link building will charge a fixed fee. Although having said that, I think Root actually have started to do a per campaign one now. Um, but it's it's relatively expensive, but it's it's really really worth it because you get the best links you're ever going to get. They're natural. They're relevant. Uh, they're exactly kind of links that that Google really wants you to get. How expensive? What do you pay them per month? Um, I'm not sure if I should say that on. What's a range? Um, so for for basic like digital PR and and those kind of services, you'd probably be looking at least like 2,000 a month, 2,000 uh GBP. Okay. So, is it fair to say you're paying them somewhere between two grand and 10,000 a month? Yeah, we we So, yeah, in that range at the moment. Yeah, that's a big range, right? So, we left enough ambiguity there, right? Where it's not it's not too revealing, but okay, that's helpful. Let's go over to your search console performance because ultimately all this SEO traffic what you want to be seeing is organic clicks from Google. So can we first off can we zoom out and go to are you custom? This is is this last 16 months? Can we go to last 16 months? This is as far back as I could take it through to uh as far as I could take it in the current time. So we have we have a bit of a dip here because that's um it's a very seasonal business obviously around towards the end of the year traffic really dips off. But this is but this is only going through 2024. Are can we see it going all the way up Competing with VC-backed resume builders using SEO through to today or do bad things happen this year? So you don't want to show 2025? No, no, I I can't show you um for from there onwards big because of the buyers. Oh, is this what you told me before the show? Oh, got it. Okay. Is did it generally get worse or better though in 2025? Um it probably stayed around the same to be honest. Okay. Okay. All right. So, take me back when hover over your your highest blue line peak. This is the guys. is this is he was getting 7,500 clicks organically. No, no, hover over the peak. He was getting 7 the peak 7,500 one of the peaks. Yeah. 7,5 7,493 clicks per day organically from Google. This was back on July 9th of 2024. And any other tactics, Andrew, you want to teach my audience? You mentioned the backlinks, you mentioned the big articles, anything else driving this traffic? Yeah. So, I would say um the the best thing you can do for SEO is to really create help from content. I know it's it's like the kind of generic thing that you always hear, but it's to really understand your ideal customer and what their problems are, what they're looking to solve, and really try to create content that's actually going to help them. I think um these days with the influx of AI tools, everybody's just trying to spin up, you know, a thousand page website in a couple of days and think that's gonna start ranking, but it's not really like in in this day and age, you need a lot more. So, just to give you an example, if we look at some of our pages here, so our CV example pages are kind of like our bread and butter. They're they're they're what the site is mainly made up of. Um, and one thing that we now like to do is is add features that you can't get from chat GPT. So here you can click on the CV to to enlarge it, have a have a look at it, and you can also switch to the text Go-to-market strategy: content, programmatic SEO, and backlinks version so that you can copy and paste it. So we're finding that if you if you're putting things onto your site that people can't get in chat GBT now, that that's helping drive clicks through because obviously if they can just get it in chat GBT, they've got no reason to leave. But if they visit your site and they can see you've got a bit more and if there's a reason to actually go to the site, then that's going to encourage them to actually visit you. Yep. Okay, let's go back to search console for a second. Can can we scroll down to see the key the queries that you're ranking really high for in the table? Okay, so how to write a CV job description template example. Okay, this all makes sense. Nothing surprising here. Um, if we scroll back up, can Okay. Yeah. Okay. CV students. Yep. Yep. Yep. Guys, the reason I show this is because you can see the programmatic SEO, right? See, it's B, you know, you can see combinations of things here, right? CV examples for and then insert a bunch of industries or, you know, uh, uh, see different kinds of templates, right? These are like programmatic, you know, playbooks here, right, Andrew? Yeah. Yeah. So, um, we actually did some programmatic SEO, which I could talk about if you like, please. Yeah. So, um, so programmatic programmatic SEO, very good, but, uh, as a word of warning, use it carefully. So we um for our example CVS um obviously a lot of the content is repeated is once you start writing these you realize that you're kind of repeating a lot of the same information over and over again but you have to tailor each one for for a particular job. Um so I actually created a tool that um enabled us to essentially type in um job titles and then got a developer to write this Python tool. Um, we basically entered a load of like staple phrases and what it would do is it would sort of randomize them, put them into the post and then just insert different um, like if you the job title was engineer, it would insert engineer into the points where it set where the job title was. And we also pulled some um, pre-written stuff from chat GPT as well. Um, and it Programmatic SEO mistakes and content pruning lessons worked really well um, in helping us to to create a lot of content at scale, but we pushed it a little bit too far and I took my eye off the ball a little bit and we were I essentially we started to lose a bit of traffic and when I looked into it, we had a lot of very very near duplicate content. So we had like sales executive CV and sales exec CV which obviously exactly the same thing. Um, so programmatic SEO is good but you have to keep an eye on it. You have to make sure the content is still quality. Otherwise, what what happened with us essentially is that we produced far too much content and it was confusing Google because a lot of it was um very much the same. So, we had ended up having to do a huge project where we did a big content prune. We got rid of a lot of the duplicate stuff, had to redirect back to the kind of main pages. Um and afterwards, we did see some recovery, but um yeah, it's it's very good, but use it sparingly. Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for that. Let's look at some of the other data points here. If we click on an average CTR button in the center top there. Yep. I just want to see if that line's going up or down generally over time. Okay. So, slightly down. A lot of people are seeing that go slightly down, especially with CHBT in 2025. What about average position? Okay. Ser flat. Okay. So, nothing shocking here, right? No. No. Yep. Okay. Cool. This is this is super helpful. Thanks for showing us that. You can stop you can stop sharing now. So, I guess help me understand what you want to do with the business. I mean, we got total lifetime sales. as you said is over a million pounds. Are you comfortable sharing what it's doing monthly today on average? Yeah. So, it's um it's doing around um I think it's about 30k MR at the moment. Okay. So, would you sell the business like if I offered you all cash, you know, $250,000 to sell the business today? Would you do the deal? Um yeah, maybe not for for that much, but um certainly open to looking for buyers at the moment. Yeah. And why is that? Why do you want to potentially sell this? You have another idea you want to move to or what? Yeah. So, I' I've actually already launched a um a SAS SEO agency. So, what I'm doing Founder lessons on pricing, churn, and focus now is I'm helping other SAS businesses to to grow their traffic and revenue with SEO. Um so, yeah. So, the Saras CV is is running um pretty passively at the moment, but uh still still with some of my involvement. Um so, we're we're in talks with a couple of different of a resume builder companies. Uh one big one in the US actually. Um so, um I am hoping to sell it in the next 6 months to a year. Mhm. And I mean, what do you are you conscious trying? Do you think it's going to be a $500,000, a million dollar price? What sort of multiple are you looking for? Um, I'm not entirely sure yet. So, what one of the um one of the issues is I still have quite a lot involvement in it. So, um people are a little bit reluctant to kind of just pay you out on like a multiple of MR um if you're if you're putting time in because obviously they then have to hire someone or use someone from their team to to carry out those tasks. Um, but I think I'm probably looking at something around the 600 700K um, in sterling range. And so if someone offered you $600,000 all cash to buy the business, but a chunk of that cash, you know, 200,000 was upfront and the rest is paid out to you as 30% of profits until you're paid the, you know, the 600k, would you be open to a structure like that? Uh, potentially. Yeah. Interesting. Well, we'll have to see where that goes. Let's give some love to your new agency. What is the website up for your SEO agency? Yeah, sure. So, it's linkquest.co.uk. Um, as I said, we are a an SEO agency that specialize in SEO for SAS businesses because SAS businesses are often um quite complex, especially in the B2B space. They it's a it's a great platform for SEO because it gives you the opportunity to write lots of content to promote in lots of different places to get back links. Um, and also what that content does is it builds trust of your customers and pushes them generally towards a a sign up for your product. Well guys, there you have it. You might think in 2025 with AI and chatbt that a Exit plans, acquisition talks, and advice for SaaS founders free resume builder software tool has no shot at making it, but Andrew just showed you his website CBURE, right? CBuilder uh uh.com and standout CB.com. and you know over a million dollars of total sales. He's increased average sale price up to 61 $62. That's lifetime value, pardon me. Scaled up nicely and now is saying, man, do we sell this thing for 500 600 600,000 bucks? We'll see what happens. But his main go to market motion, over 50 million impressions generated from his website using really smart SEO tactics. Andrew, thank you for taking us to the top.