How StandOut CV Reached $360K Revenue and 30K MRR with Organic SEO (Interview with Founder Andrew Fennell)

Headline Numbers Teaser

Nathan Latka

00:00What it's doing monthly today on average.

Andrew Fennell

00:01>> I think it's about 30 k MRR at the moment.

Nathan Latka

00:03Growing this business to 18,000,000 visitors and over £1,000,000 of revenue.

Andrew Fennell

00:08>> When I first started the website, what I was doing was reaching out to a lot of small job websites and careers blogs. In the beginning, it was just me doing everything with a handful of freelance writers.

Guest Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:20Hey, folks. My guest today is Andrew Fennel. You know, he reached out cold to me, 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 gonna learn you're gonna learn how he built his company standout -cv.com, right, which is a interview winning

00:41CV 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 gonna teach us how he's grown this business to 18,000,000 visitors and over a million pounds of revenue. Andrew, you ready to take us to the top?

Why Andrew Chose the CV Space

Andrew Fennell

00:55>> Yes, Nick. Thanks very much for having me.

Nathan Latka

00:58Alright. So first off, when people visit CV, if they wanna 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?

Andrew Fennell

01:07>> Well, I I wouldn't say I really picked it. I guess it kind it it picked me in a weird way. So, prior to, starting this website, I worked in recruitment for a few years, but I was I never really liked it, and I was always trying to start online business on the side. And I initially started freelancing, writing people CVs for them. And then once we got a bit of traction, I started to get a few,

01:33>> clients through that. I started the website. Initially, it was a a CV writing service, website. But, basically, over the, over the years, it made more sense to move to an advertising business model and then finally finally to an app.

How the CV Builder Product Works

Nathan Latka

01:52Interesting. Okay. So is can I view the app on my screen here somewhere, or is

Andrew Fennell

01:55>> it Yeah? Yeah. So you see the CV builder, the in the in the top bar there or the or the Craig yeah. That'd there. And that would take you to that, and you can go to Craigie CV now, and you can essentially pick templates, change the colors, all that kind of thing, add prewritten content.

Nathan Latka

02:11Bing. Bing. Okay. What happens at the end?

Andrew Fennell

02:15>> So, once once you've built the full CV, it will give you a preview of it. And then, once you're happy with it, you can then pay to download it. So it's initial, just a a low price to have it for the first two weeks. And then if you wanna, keep it and have it to edit and use for more applications and tailor it, then it's, a it's a monthly, $16.95, per month.

Nathan Latka

02:40Mhmm. Why can't you fill all this in with AI? Why do I have to do so much work on the onboarding to get to get to get it accurate?

Andrew Fennell

02:45>> That's because we haven't got around to putting AI in yet. So we're in the we're in the process of that at the moment. So it's you can you can have lots of prewritten content, but at the moment, we haven't plugged AI into it yet, but we are we're working on it.

Nathan Latka

02:58I see. Well, so why would people use this over just like exporting their LinkedIn profile?

Andrew Fennell

03:04>> Because so essentially, the there's well, there's a couple of reasons really. So firstly, just the sheer amount of traffic we get through to the website and we whole kind of ethos behind the site is that we put so much free and helpful info out there that we kind of build trust with people and that they come through to the builder. And also

Nathan Latka

03:25And we guys, we can look at that here. 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, mean, we can see your domain rating seven three. Very, very, very strong domain rating. Yes. Organic traffic looks about 60,000 per month, right?

Stripe Revenue Dashboard Walkthrough

Andrew Fennell

03:37>> Yeah. It's a bit more than that. AGREF is not always 100% accurate. It's about 110 ks at the moment. At its peak, it was around about 300 ks. We've had sort of ups and downs over the last few years. Informational content has taken a bit of a hit lately, but we still get plenty of traffics.

Nathan Latka

03:55And tell me about this specific actually, are you just so we can I don't wanna 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?

Andrew Fennell

04:05>> Yeah, sure. Do want me to just share that now?

Nathan Latka

04:07And guys, what I'm excited to learn more from Andrew here over the next ten minutes again, the SEO play, I think he's like a one man shop or a very small team, again bootstrapped. 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

04:26then where you're at today?

Andrew Fennell

04:27>> Yeah. So we so we look I launched the actual website around ten years ago. As I said, it was initially a CV writing service. But what's basically, I quickly learned that, you know, I I think it was a typical thing of that you think you're gonna get floods of traffic in when you create a website, and then you realize you're not. No. Nothing comes in. I played around with with paid ads, and then I I I

04:52>> started to learn about SEO. And initially, I I bought some like a a cheap SEO package from somebody on Fiverr or no. Actually, on PeoplePerHour, is like an older freelance site. And then when I got the backlinks through, I just realized that they were terrible, and that I had to do it myself, basically. So then I I spent the next two to three years learning SEO, creating helpful content, building the right kind of backlinks. And it

05:20>> it was a slow growth. It probably took a good year or so to, to really take off.

Nathan Latka

05:24Can you can you just because we can't see growth on here. Right? Can you click view more maybe under the gross volume? Will that actually show us

Andrew Fennell

05:31>> just Yeah. So annoyingly, saying that the graph won't load. Let me just

Nathan Latka

05:35Rev, are these people paying you monthly recurring or do have to get new sales every month from new customers?

Andrew Fennell

05:39>> It's so it's a it's a mixture. So it it is monthly recurring, but, the problem with, like, a careers based app like this is that, obviously, people don't stay around forever. So MR terms have fluctuate. So we do we do rely on new, new customers coming in.

Nathan Latka

05:55Okay. Let's focus on this screen for a second. Stay at the bottom if you're if you're comfortable doing this.

Subscriber Lifetime Value and Pricing Evolution

Andrew Fennell

05:58>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

05:59Sure. Subscriber lifetime value is $67 and £43. It started off much lower than that, like sub 20. What did you do to increase the lifetime value over the past? Hover over that when the purple line was zero in the bottom left graph.

Andrew Fennell

06:11>> Basically what we did with that is so initially when I first started the app,

Nathan Latka

06:17we're not gonna have to Andrew I want people to see the timeline. Can you hover over that line graph in the bottom left of your subscriber lifetime value and go down to where it's zero? Yep. Yeah. So over a little bit more. Right to when it starts to go up. Okay. Right there. Yeah. So this was the purple line. Yep. Yeah. So this was 2021. Yes. You start driving up lifetime value. So tell us how your

06:36pricing evolved over time to drive this up.

Andrew Fennell

06:38>> Yes. So essentially, I had the app developed after we'd built up revenue from advertising and I decided it was the right time to build our own app. And the mistake I made in the beginning was that I didn't go with a monthly recurring plan, a a subscription model. I I went with a onetime payment plan. And although that initially attracted people, it didn't, it ruined, subscriber lifetime value, basically. People because people were buying once for £15,

07:11>> and then not coming back again. So, so basically, we switched to a subscription model, and that massively increased the revenue.

Churn Rate Improvement from 44 Percent

Nathan Latka

07:21That's amazing. Let's do the chart at the center top here. Subscriber churn rate. It spiked at above 40%. Could you just hover over that? The spike? Yeah. Yeah. So 44% in 2022. You've improved that drastically through to 2025. How'd you improve that?

Andrew Fennell

07:35>> Yeah. So nothing in particular really, just just continually improving the product really. So we 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. And what we did is we put a survey. If anybody ever, well, for all customers that canceled their subscription, we put a quick survey up to ask them why they were canceling, what they didn't like about it, and

08:01>> what products they'd like to see. And then every month, we would review that, and we would pick the most the most popular feature requests and add them, and that just helped us to to keep people on board for longer over time.

Nathan Latka

08:14Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 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 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

08:37I'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 5%. 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 people that put in their email then convert to a paid plan?

Trial Conversion Rate at 34 Percent

Andrew Fennell

09:01>> So no. So 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 on 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.

Nathan Latka

09:26I see. So the cheap paid into full subscription.

Andrew Fennell

09:29>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:30Okay. So may okay. Maybe that's why it's little bit higher, but still it 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?

Andrew Fennell

09:41>> Yes. Of course. Yeah. If I scroll up here,

09:45>> this this here is the total gross volume that we've, that we've generated, with the app since creation.

Nathan Latka

09:53Which is between what year and what year?

Andrew Fennell

09:55>> That's in about four years.

Nathan Latka

09:59Cool. So between '20 sorry. 2020 and 2025. You've done a million pounds. And is this you? So so one So

Andrew Fennell

10:06>> I just like to say, I actually do a lot of the league building myself still, but they they supplement it very well. So they're a company called Root Digital who are based here in The UK.

Nathan Latka

10:15Can you show me their website?

Andrew Fennell

10:16>> I kinda did.

Nathan Latka

10:18And while that's loading, you mentioned you still do some of 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?

Lifetime Revenue Over 1 Million Pounds

Andrew Fennell

10:35>> Yeah. So shall 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 Please. Moved towards?

Nathan Latka

10:42Yes.

Andrew Fennell

10:43>> Yeah. Okay. So so link building is is probably one of the hardest parts of SEO.

Link Building Strategy and Root Digital

Andrew Fennell

10:48>> When I've when I first started the website, what I was doing was reaching out to a lot of small job websites and careers blogs and and mostly pitching guest posts. And that still is a valid tactic, but it it's it's not as success successful anymore as it was back then simply because so many people are doing it that websites are getting been reluctant to it now. They find it spammy, so they don't they don't really wanna

11:13>> engage in it. So it can it can still get you some of the way, but what we've moved to now, a more natural piece of useful piece of content that naturally attract links. And that this is something really that Root Digital kind of taught me, and I've I've done some of myself as well. But, basically, the the two kind of pillars of it are, digital PR.

Nathan Latka

11:38Can you show us an example, by the way, while you give the story?

Andrew Fennell

11:40>> Yeah. I can indeed. Yep. So let me just I'll give you I'll give you one of each. So just go to

Nathan Latka

11:57Now guys, I'm gonna give you the Ahref numbers while you're seeing the front end, but I'm gonna read you the Ahrefs. So according to Ahrefs, this page that Andrew's sharing right now has 2,130 referring domains, 4,403 referring pages, and generates about a thousand organic clicks per month of free traffic to Andrew's tool.

12:19So Andrew why does it hit so many backlinks?

Andrew Fennell

12:22>> Sorry which page is that Nathan?

Nathan Latka

12:25That's what you're on right now. Just your stat no. Not your blog. Your forward /stats page.

Andrew Fennell

12:30>> Oh, the stats page. So It says

Nathan Latka

12:32forward / stats. It's like Sorry. Let me just It's job interview statistics.

Andrew Fennell

12:37>> Which statistics? Sorry.

Nathan Latka

12:41For it's it's your it's your URL. That's standout-cv.com/stats/jobinterviewstatistics. It's your stats page, not your blog.

Linkable Assets and Digital PR Examples

Andrew Fennell

12:50>> Okay. Yeah. No. That's a good one. Let me just, 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, a linkable asset or evergreen, linkable content. And essentially what this is is you collate data that is very important to journalists for a particular topic. So this topic is obviously job interview stats in The UK. Just to give you an example,

13:18>> 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 really reputable sources all across across across the Internet, and we put them all in one place. Then we titled it something like job interview stats because that that's the kind of thing that journalists are looking for. And if you if you do this properly, this content will rank naturally without

13:46>> having to do any outreach, and you will attract a lot of links. Like, you can see this page has, 335 referring domains and that they're all natural links and some of those links come from really big websites, news websites, big, big brand job websites in The UK and in The US as well.

Nathan Latka

14:05Most 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 6,000 word sort of piece of long form anchor content.

Andrew Fennell

14:16>> Yeah, no, that's right. So this is just very data driven. So data is becoming very important in link building, I would say. Like that is the number one thing that we use. So that's an example of a linkable asset. The other thing we do, well, the the Root do for us is digital PR. So they Mhmm. I'll give let me just quickly pull up the example.

14:39>> K.

14:42>> K. So they 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 get get data from public sources and analyze it. So lots of different ways they can do it. But essentially here, they surveyed, I think, a thousand people in The States asking them if

15:11>> they'd ever lied on their resume, why they lied on their resume, if it helped them get their job, that kind of thing. And then they go to press with the story, and this did really well. So this one has 212 referring domains, and this had some really big, some really big pickups. So I think it got picked up by entrepreneur, maybe CNN, a few a few of the big, US news sites.

Nathan Latka

15:35So how do you pay Root for this? Is it a fixed fee per month or pay per backlink? How do you pay that?

Andrew Fennell

15:40>> 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, think Root actually has started to do a per campaign one now. But it's it's relatively expensive, but it's it's really, really worth because you get the best links you're ever gonna get. They're natural. They're relevant. They're exactly kind of links that that Google really wants you to

16:04>> get.

Nathan Latka

16:06How expensive? What do you pay them per month?

Andrew Fennell

16:08>> I'm not sure if I should say that would be interesting. What's a range? So

16:17>> basic digital PR and those kind of services, you'd probably be looking at least like 2,000 a month, 2,000 GBP.

Nathan Latka

16:26Okay. So is it fair to say you're paying them somewhere between $2 and 10,000 a month?

Andrew Fennell

16:30>> Yeah, so yeah, in that range at the moment, yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:35That's a big range right?

Andrew Fennell

16:36>> So we left enough ambiguity there right where it's not too revealing.

Nathan Latka

16:38But 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 the last sixteen months, can we go to the last sixteen months?

Andrew Fennell

16:51>> This is as far back as I could take it through to, far as I could take it in the current time. So we have a bit of a dip here because that's, it's a very seasonal business obviously around, towards the end of the year, traffic really dips off.

Nathan Latka

17:06But this is but this is only going through 2024. Can we see it going all the way up through today, or do do bad things happen this year so you don't wanna show 2025?

Andrew Fennell

17:14>> No. No. I I can't show you from there onwards big because of the buyers.

Nathan Latka

17:20Oh, is this what you

17:22told me before the show? Oh, got it. Okay. Is did it generally get worse or better, though, in 2025?

Andrew Fennell

17:28>> It probably stayed around the same, to be honest.

Nathan Latka

17:31Okay. Okay. Alright. So take me back when hover over your your highest blue line peak. This is because this is he was getting 7,500 clicks organically.

17:40>> No. No. Hover over the peak.

17:42He was getting seven the peak, 7,500. One of the peaks.

Andrew Fennell

17:45>> Yes. 7,005 7,493 clicks per day organically from Google.

Nathan Latka

17:49This was back on 07/09/2024. And any other tactics, Andrew, you wanna teach my audience?

17:54>> You mentioned the backlinks. You mentioned the big articles. Anything else driving

18:00this traffic?

Andrew Fennell

18:01>> Yeah. So I would say, the the best thing you can do for SEO is to really create health and 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 gonna help them. I think, these days with the influx of AI tools, everybody's just trying to spin up,

18:26>> 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, need a lot more. So just to give you an example, if we look at some of our pages. So our CV example pages are kind of like our bread and butter. They're they're they're what the the site is mainly made up of. And one thing that we now like to

18:50>> do is is add features that you can't get from ChatGPT. So here, you can click on the CV to to enlarge it and have a have a look at it, and you can also switch to the text 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 ChatGPT now, that that's helping drive clicks through because, obviously, if they can just

19:14>> get it in ChatGPT, 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 gonna encourage them to actually visit you.

Nathan Latka

19:24Yep. 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. I

Andrew Fennell

19:37>> could show you

Nathan Latka

19:38some If 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 You know you can see combinations of things here, right? CV examples for and then insert a bunch of industries. Or you know, see different kinds of templates, These are like programmatic, you know, playbooks here. Right, Andrew?

Programmatic SEO Lessons and Content Pruning

Andrew Fennell

19:59>> Yeah. Yeah. So we actually did some programmatic SEO, which I could talk about if you

Nathan Latka

20:03like. Please.

Andrew Fennell

20:05>> Yeah. So so programmatic programmatic SEO, very good. But as a word of warning, use it carefully. So we for our example, CVs, obviously, a lot of the content is repeated. It's 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. So I actually created a tool that enabled us to essentially type in job

20:38>> titles, and then I got a developer to write this Python tool. 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 like, if you the job title was engineer, it would insert engineer into the points where it's set where the job title was. And we also pulled some pre written stuff from ChatGPT as well. And it

21:02>> worked really well 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 board 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 are obviously exactly the

21:25>> same thing. 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 to us essentially is that we produced far too much content, and it was confusing Google because a lot of it was very much the same. So we had ended up having sort of huge projects where we did a big content prune. We got rid of a lot of

21:45>> the duplicate stuff, had to redirect back to the kind of main pages. And afterwards, we did see some recovery. But yeah it's very good but use it sparingly.

Nathan Latka

21:57Makes a lot of sense, thanks for that. Let's look at some other data points here. If we click on average CTR button in the center top there.

Andrew Fennell

22:03>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

22:04I 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 ChatGPT in 2025.

Andrew Fennell

22:12>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

22:13What about average position?

22:14>> Okay. Serving for a flat. Okay. Nothing shocking in here.

22:16Right? No. Not. Yep.

22:17>> Okay cool. This is super helpful. Thanks for showing us that. You can stop sharing now.

22:22So I guess help me understand what you wanna do with the business. I mean we got total lifetime sales you said it's over £1,000,000. Are you comfortable sharing what it's doing monthly today on average?

Search Console Performance and Traffic Trends

Andrew Fennell

22:32>> Yeah so it's doing around I think it's about 30 k MRR at the moment.

Nathan Latka

22:39Okay 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?

Andrew Fennell

22:46>> Yeah. Maybe not for for that much, but, so certainly open to looking for buyers at the moment. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

22:52And why is that? Why do you wanna potentially sell this? Do you have another idea you wanna move to or what?

Andrew Fennell

22:56>> Yeah. So I've I've actually already launched a, a SAS SEO agency. So what I'm doing now is I'm helping other SAS businesses to to grow their traffic and revenue with SEO. So, yeah, so the Sona CV is is running, pretty passively at the moment, but, still still with some of my involvement. So we're we're in talks with a couple of different of a resume builder companies. One big one in The US, actually. So, I am hoping

23:24>> to sell it in the next, like, six months to a year.

Nathan Latka

23:26Mhmm. Mhmm. And, well, I mean, what do you are you comfortable sharing, do you think it's gonna be a $500,000 or a million dollar price or what sort of multiple are you looking for?

Andrew Fennell

23:34>> I'm not entirely sure yet. So one of the issues is I still have quite a lot involvement in it. So people are a little bit reluctant to kind of just pay you out on, a multiple of MRR if you're if you're putting timing because, obviously, they then have to hire someone or use someone from their team to to carry out those tasks. But I think I'm probably looking at something around the $607,100,000 dollars in sterling range.

Nathan Latka

24:01And 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 you know the 600 ks would you be open to a structure like that?

Andrew Fennell

24:14>> Potentially yeah.

Nathan Latka

24:17Interesting. Well we'll have to see where that goes. Let's give some love to your new What is the website up for your SEO agency?

New SEO Agency Linkwest

Andrew Fennell

24:22>> Yeah. Sure. So it's linkwest.co.uk. As I said, we are a an an SEO agency that specialize in SEO for SaaS businesses. Because SaaS businesses are often quite complex, especially in the b to b 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 backlinks. And also what that content does is it builds trust with your customers and

MRR Today and Potential Sale of the Business

Andrew Fennell

24:51>> pushes them gently towards a sign up for your product. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

24:57Well guys, there you have it. You might think in 2025 with AI ChatGPT that a free resume builder software tool has no shot at making it. But Andrew just showed you his website CB Builder, right? Cbbuilder.com and standoutcb.com and over $1,000,000 of total sales. He's increased average sale price up to $61.62 dollars, that's lifetime value, pardon me. Scaled up nicely, and now is saying, do we sell this thing for $506,100,000 bucks? We'll see what happens, but

25:24his main go to market motion, over 50,000,000 impressions generated from his website using really smart SEO tactics. Andrew, thank you for taking us to the top.