Founder uses Genius Playbook to hit $1M revenue with no employees

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Entrepreneurship, Business

4.6 • 683 Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2025

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Fennell, founder of Standout CV, to unpack how he built and scaled a resume-builder SaaS to over 18 million organic visitors, $30K MRR, and $1M+ in lifetime revenue — without venture funding.

Andrew walks through his SEO-first go-to-market strategy, pricing evolution, churn reduction, and the exact content and link-building tactics that helped him win in an ultra-competitive space. This episode is a masterclass in bootstrapped SaaS growth, monetization, and acquisition efficiency.
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What You'll Learn

Founder Story

How a recruitment background led to a SaaS opportunity
Transitioning from services to scalable software
Bootstrapping vs. raising capital

Pricing & Revenue

Why one-time payments killed LTV
Switching to subscriptions to unlock recurring revenue
Using low-friction paid trials to boost conversion

GTM / Outbound

SEO as the core go-to-market motion
Why content beats ads in crowded markets
Building trust before monetization

SEO / AEO

Creating linkable assets journalists actually cite
Digital PR vs. guest posting
Programmatic SEO pitfalls and content pruning

Scaling & Operations

Reducing churn in naturally short-term SaaS use cases
Running a high-margin SaaS with a small team
Positioning a bootstrapped business for acquisition

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Andrew started Standout CV as a freelance CV-writing service, evolved it into a content-driven traffic engine, and eventually built a subscription SaaS now generating consistent monthly revenue. Today, he's also advising other SaaS companies on SEO while exploring acquisition offers for the business.

Whether you're a bootstrapped SaaS founder, B2B operator, or investor evaluating SEO-driven businesses, this episode is a masterclass in organic acquisition, monetization, and building real leverage without venture capital.

Connect with Andrew:

Standout-CV.com

Connect with Nathan:

FounderPath.com

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	What it's doing monthly today on average.
0:01.7	I think it's about 30K at the moment.
0:03.5	Growing this business to 18 million visitors and over a million pounds of revenue.
0:08.7	When I first started the website, what I was doing was reaching out to a lot of small job websites
0:14.6	and careers blogs.
0:15.9	In the beginning, it was just me doing everything with a house full of freelance writers.
0:20.3	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 hyphen cv.com, right, which is a interview winning CV and online CV builder.
0:43.1	Now, this is a very competitive space. So you know he has to be very good at SEO to win in this space.
0:47.8	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, 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 the space? Well, I wouldn't say I really picked it. I guess it kind of, 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. I was always trying to start online business on the side. And I initially started freelancing, writing people's CVs for them.
1:28.9	And then once we got a bit of traction, I started to get a few clients through that.
1:34.9	I started the website.
1:36.3	Initially, it was a CV writing service website.
1:40.4	But basically, over the years, it made more sense to move to an advertising business model and then finally finally to an app
1:51.0	interesting okay so can I view the app on my screen here somewhere or is it yeah yeah so you see the CV builder the in the top bar there or the or the Craig, yeah that'd be there and that would take you to that and you can go to Craig's
2:04.1	CV now and you can essentially pick template change the colors all that kind of thing
2:09.6	at pre-written content.
2:10.9	Bing, bang, bang.
2:12.9	Okay.
2:13.9	What happens at the end?
2:15.4	So once you've built the full CV, it will give you a preview of it.
2:20.8	And then once you're happy with it, you can then pay to download it.
2:24.6	So it's initial just a low price to have it for the first two weeks.
	...

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