How StandOut CV Hit 18M Visitors and £1M Revenue With SEO and Link Building

What it's doing monthly today on average.

I think it's about 30 k MRR at the moment.

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

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.

Hey, folks. My guest today is Andrew Fennell. 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 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 gonna teach us how he's grown this business to 18,000,000 visitors and over £1,000,000 of revenue. Andrew, you ready to take us to the top?

Yes, Nick. Thanks very much for having me.

Alright. 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?

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,

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.

Interesting. Okay. So is... Can I view the app on my screen here somewhere, or is 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.

Bing. Bing. Bing. Okay. What happens at the end?

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.

Mhmm. 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?

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.

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

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

And 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?

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 traffic.

And 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?

Yeah, sure. Do want me to just share that now?

And 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 then where you're at today?

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

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

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

Can 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 just...

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

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

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.

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

Yeah.

Sure. 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.

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

we'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 pricing evolved over time to drive this up.

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 one time 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, and then not coming back again. So, so basically, we switched to a subscription model, and that massively increased the revenue.

That'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?

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

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.

Guys, 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

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 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?

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 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.

I see. So the cheap paid into full subscription.

Yeah.

Okay. 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?

Yes. Of course. Yeah. If I scroll up here, this this here is the total gross volume that we've, that we've generated, 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. You've done £1,000,000. And is this you? So so one So

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.

Can you show me their website?

I kinda did.

And 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?

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?

Yes.

Yeah. Okay. So so link building is is probably one of the hardest parts of SEO.

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

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.

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 I'll give you one of each. So just go to...

Now 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.

So Andrew why does it hit so many backlinks?

Sorry which page is that Nathan?

That's what you're on right now. Just your stat... No. Not your blog. Your forward slash stats page.

Oh, the stats page. So It says forward slash stats.

It's like Sorry. Let me just It's job interview statistics.

Which statistics? Sorry.

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

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,

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

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.

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 6,000 word sort of piece of long form anchor content.

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. K.

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

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.

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 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 get.

How expensive? What do you pay them per month?

I'm not sure if I should say that would be interesting. What's a range? So basic digital PR and those kind of services, you'd probably be looking at least like 2,000 a month, 2,000 GBP.

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

Yeah, 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 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 the last sixteen months, can we go to the last sixteen months?

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.

But 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?

No. No. I I can't show you 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?

It probably stayed around the same, to be honest.

Okay. 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. No. No. Hover over the peak. He was getting seven... The peak, 7,500. One of the peaks. Yes. 7,005... 7,493 clicks per day organically from Google. This was back on 07/09/2024. And any other tactics, Andrew, you wanna teach my audience? You mentioned the backlinks. You mentioned the big articles. Anything else driving this traffic?

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,

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

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

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.

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. I

could show you

some 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?

Yeah. Yeah. So we actually did some programmatic SEO, which I could talk about if you like.

Please.

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 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 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 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 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.

Makes 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. 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 ChatGPT in 2025. Yeah. What about average position?

Okay. Serving for a flat. Okay. Nothing shocking in here. Right? No. Not. Yep. Okay cool, this is super helpful. Thanks for showing us that. You can stop sharing now. So 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?

Yeah so it's doing around I think it's about 30 k MRR 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?

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

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

Yeah. So I've I've actually already launched a, a SaaS SEO agency. So what I'm doing now is I'm helping other SaaS 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 to sell it in the next, like, six months to a year.

Mhmm. 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?

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 like 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.

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 percent of profits until you're paid you know the 600 ks would you be open to a structure like that?

Potentially yeah.

Interesting. 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?

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

pushes them gently towards a sign up for your product. Mhmm.

Well 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

his 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.