SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Founder uses Genius Playbook to hit $1M revenue with no employees
24 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: How did Andrew Fennell transition from recruitment to SaaS?
what it's doing monthly today on average. I think it's about 30K MRR 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 a lot of small job websites and careers blogs. In the beginning, it was just me doing everything with a house full of freelance writers.
Hey folks, my guest today is Andrew Fennell. 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 how he built his company, standout-cb.com.
which is an 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 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 us to the top? Yes, Nick. 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 resume application or something. Why did you pick this space? Well, I wouldn't say I really picked it. I guess it picked me in a weird way. So prior to starting this website, I worked in recruitment for a few years.
But I never really liked it, and I was always trying to start online business on the side. And I initially started freelancing, writing people's 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 was 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 yeah yeah so you see the cv builder the in the in the top bar there or the or the craig yeah that'd be that and that would take you to that and you can go to craig's 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 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 low price to have it for the first two weeks. And then if you want to keep it and have it to edit and use for more applications and tailor it, then it's a monthly $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 it accurate? That's because we haven't got around to putting AI in it yet. So we're in the process of that at the moment. So you can have lots of pre-written content, but at the moment we haven't plugged AI into it yet, but we're working on it. I see. Well, so why would people use this over just like exporting their LinkedIn profile?
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Chapter 2: What pricing strategies helped increase Standout CV's revenue?
It's about 110K at the moment. It was, at its peak, it was around about 300K. 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 strategy. Actually, are you comfortable, 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? 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.
This is how you build real wealth, right? I mean, full control. 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 launched the actual website around 10 years ago. As I said, it was initially a CV writing service.
But what basically I quickly learned that, you know, I think it was a typical thing 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. I played around with paid ads and then I started to learn about SEO.
And initially, I bought some like a cheap SEO package from somebody on Fiverr or actually on People Per Hour, which 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 spent the next two to three years learning SEO, creating helpful content, building the right kind of backlinks.
And it was a slow growth. It probably took a good year or so to really take off. 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? Yeah, so annoyingly, it's saying that the graph won't load.
Let me just... Are these people paying you monthly recurring or do you have to get new sales every month from new customers? It's a mixture. So it is monthly recurring, but the problem with a careers-based app like this is that obviously people don't stay around forever. So MRR tends to fluctuate. So we do rely on new customers coming in. Okay, let's focus on this screen for a second.
Stay at the bottom if you're comfortable doing this. Yeah, sure. Subscriber lifetime value, $67.43. 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. Yeah, sure. In the bottom left graph.
Basically, what we did with that is, so initially, when I first started the app, so when I had the- Well, Andrew, I want people to see the timeline. Can you hover over that line graph in the bottom left of your screen, subscriber lifetime value, and go down to where it's zero? Yep. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How did SEO influence Andrew's go-to-market strategy?
So over a little bit more, right to when it starts to go up. Okay. 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 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 subscription model. I went with a one time payment plan. And although that initially attracted people, it didn't. It ruins subscriber lifetime value. Basically, people with people buying once for 15 pounds and then not coming back again.
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 turn 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 continually improving the product, really. So when we first built it, it was kind of 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, for all customers that cancelled their subscription, we put a quick survey up to ask them why they were cancelling, 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 popular feature requests and add them. And that just helped us to keep people on board for longer over time.
Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in 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 5%, even some B2B, it's hard to get above like 5%. You're at 34%.
Now, am I reading this right?
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Chapter 4: What link-building tactics did Andrew use to boost traffic?
That's 34% of people that put in their email, then convert to a paid plan. So no, 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 if you don't cancel in that period, you go on to the full subscription, which is £16.95 a month.
So that's people who convert from that very cheap paid trial into the full subscription. I see. So the cheap paid into full subscription. Okay. So maybe that's why it's a 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 here is the total gross volume 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 2020 and 2025, you've done a million pounds. And is this you? So I'd just like to say I actually do a lot of the league building myself still, but 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 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 are actually doing backlinking well. They're doing something creative. What are you doing? Yeah.
So should I give you a bit of a run through of what I used to do when I first started and now what I've kind of moved towards? Please. Yeah. Okay. So link building is probably one of the hardest parts of SEO. When I first started the website, what I was doing was reaching out to a lot of small job websites and careers blogs and mostly pitching guest posts.
And that still is a valid tactic, but it's not as successful anymore as it was back then, simply because so many people are doing it that websites are getting a bit reluctant to it now. They find it spammy, so they don't really want to engage in it. So it can still get you some of the way, but what we've moved to now, a more useful piece of content that naturally attract links.
And this is something really that Root Digital kind of taught me, and I've done some of myself as well. But basically, 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 one of each. So just go to...
Now, guys, I'm going to give you the Ahrefs numbers while you're seeing the front end, but I'm going to 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 1,000 organic clicks per month of free traffic to Andrew's tool. So, Andrew, why does it get so many backlinks?
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Chapter 5: How did Andrew reduce churn in his SaaS business?
Sorry, which page is that, Nathan? That's what you're on right now. No, not your blog, your forward slash stats page. Oh, the stats page. It says forward slash stats. It's like job interview statistics. Which statistics, sorry? It's your URL. That's standout-cb.com forward slash stats forward slash job interview statistics. That'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 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 one, 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 the internet. And we put them all in one place. And we titled it something like job interview stats, because that's the kind of thing that journalists are looking for.
And 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 here. has 335 referring domains. And they're all natural links. And some of those links come from really big websites, news websites, 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.
It's the number one thing that we use. So that's the example of a linkable asset. And the other thing we do, the root do for us is digital PR. So let me just quickly pull up the example. Okay. Okay. Okay, so they did this for us. So this is how many people lie on their resume. So what digital PR does is they create stories using data in your industry.
So for this one, they use a survey, but they sometimes will... 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 pickups. So I think it got picked up by Entrepreneur, maybe CNN, a few of the big US news sites. So how do you pay Root for this?
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Chapter 6: What content strategies did Andrew implement for growth?
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, I think Root actually has started to do a per campaign one now.
But it's relatively expensive, but it's really, really worth it because you get the best links you're ever going to get. They're natural. They're relevant. They're exactly the kind of links 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. What's the range?
So for basic like digital PR and those kinds of services, you'd probably be looking at least like 2000 a month, 2000 GBP. Okay. So is it fair to say you're paying them somewhere between two grand 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? Is this the last 16 months? Can we go to the last 16 months? This is as far back as I could take it through to as far as I could take it in the current time.
So we have a bit of a dip here because it's a very seasonal business, obviously. Around towards the end of the year, traffic really dips off. But this is only going through 2024. Can we see it going all the way up through today, or do bad things happen this year so you don't want to show 2025? No, no, I can't show you from there onwards because of the buyers.
Oh, is this what you told me before the show? Oh, got it. Okay. Did it generally get worse or better, though, in 2025? It probably stayed around the same, to be honest. Okay. Okay. All right. So take me back when you 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. Yeah. 7,500, 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?
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Chapter 7: How did Andrew's pricing model evolve over time?
You mentioned the backlinks, you mentioned the big articles, anything else driving this traffic? Yeah, so I would say the best thing you can do for SEO is to really create helpful content.
I know 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 these days with the influx of AI tools, everybody's just trying to spin up a 1,000-page website in a couple of days and think that's going to
start ranking but it's not really like 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 what the site is mainly made up of um and one thing that we now like to do 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 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 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 the 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. If we scroll back up, can, okay. Yeah. Okay. CV students. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guys, the reason I show this is because you can see the programmatic SEO, right? You can see combinations of things here, right? See the examples for and then insert a bunch of industries or see different kinds of templates, right? These are like programmatic playbooks here, right, Andrew? Yeah, yeah. So we actually did some programmatic SEO, which I could talk about if you like. Please. Yeah.
So 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. 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 a particular job. So I actually created a tool that...
It 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 the job title was engineer, it would insert engineer into the points where it's sitting, 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 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, 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.
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Chapter 8: What future plans does Andrew have for his business?
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 goes slightly down, especially with ChatGPT in 2025. Yeah. What about average position? Okay. So nothing shocking in here, right? No, not at all. Yeah. 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, you said is over a million pounds. Are you comfortable sharing what it's doing monthly today on average? Yeah, so it's, it's doing around, I think it's about 30k MMR 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 that much, but certainly looking for buyers at the moment, yeah. And why is that? Why do you want to potentially sell this? Do you have another idea you want to move to or what? Yeah, so I've actually already launched a SaaS SEO agency.
So what I'm doing now is I'm helping other SaaS businesses to grow their traffic and revenue with SEO. So yeah, so the Sandhouse EV is running pretty passively at the moment, but still with some of my involvement. So we're in talks with a couple of different other resume builder companies. One big one in the U.S. actually. So I'm hoping to sell it in the next six months to a year.
I mean, are you confident, do you think it's going to be a $500,000, a million dollar price? 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 of 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 putting time in, because obviously they then have to hire someone or use someone from their team to carry out those tasks. But I think I'm probably looking at something around the six, 700K 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 600 K, 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 agency.
Is the website up for your SEO agency? Yeah, sure. So it's linkwest.co.uk. As I said, we are an SEO agency that specializes in SEO for SaaS businesses. Because SaaS businesses are often quite complex, especially in the B2B space, it's a great platform for SEO because it gives you the opportunity to write lots of content to Perot and lots of different places to get backlinks.
And also what that content does is it builds trust with your customers and pushes them generally towards a sign-up for your product. Well, guys, there you have it. You might think in 2025 with AI and ChatGPT that a free resume builder software tool has no shot at making it, but Andrew just showed you his website, cbbuilder.com, and standout-cb.com, and over a million dollars of total sales.
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