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...