How I Built A $360K/Month SaaS Resume Builder With SEO Content
Who are you and what business did you start?
I'm Andrew Fennell, and I spent more than 10 years launching, growing and eventually selling one of the UK's biggest CV builder platforms, StandOut-CV.com.
StandOut CV serves jobseekers across all industries and experience levels, helping them create interview-winning CVs and resumes and land their dream jobs. What started as a small CV advice blog designed to promote a CV-writing service turned into one of the UK's biggest and most trusted CV advice websites.
The site attracted more than 18 million visitors - reaching 300,000 per month - and was featured in nearly every major publication, from Forbes and Fast Company to The Guardian and the Daily Mail. Within four years of launching the platform, more than 23,000 people had signed up to create a CV.
The CV-builder platform grew to $40,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and the business was sold for a mid-six-figure sum in April 2026.
Andrew Fennell
Founder-Market Fit
Skills
What skills did Andrew Fennell have that led to their success?
How do you come up with the idea for StandOut CV?
I had tried and failed with several businesses over the years, including canvas printing, furniture removals and even a website that allowed customers to design and order their own custom superhero outfits.
In 2015, I was working in recruitment and started writing CVs and résumés on PeoplePerHour as a side hustle. I quickly became busy and began earning a decent side income, which showed me there was strong demand for the service. I decided to launch my own website, bought the domain StandOut-CV.com and spent a few weeks building a Shopify store.
However, I was hugely disappointed when the website failed to attract any visitors or customers. That prompted me to start learning about digital marketing, and I quickly became obsessed with SEO. I spent entire weekends reading blog posts by people such as Brian Dean, Neil Patel, Pat Flynn and Spencer Haws, then applied what I learnt to the site.
I created in-depth guides and free resources and wrote guest posts for small job sites to build links. Not many competitors were taking this approach at the time, so within about six months, the site began ranking for a wide range of CV-related searches. Most importantly, it started ranking for “CV writing services”, which brought in a steady stream of leads and customers.
I was amazed by the power of SEO. It took a long time to produce results, but once they arrived, they were far beyond what I had thought possible.
At that point, I knew there was huge demand for CV-related services, and that I had found a reliable way to capture it through SEO. So I quit my job and began working on StandOut CV full-time.
After several years of consistently publishing helpful content for jobseekers, we progressed from guest posting on smaller websites to earning coverage from major job platforms such as CV-Library and publications such as The Guardian.
I then began experimenting with advertising as another way to monetise the website. I gradually added more Google Ads to our guides, and once the site was attracting more than 250,000 visitors per month, the advertising revenue began to dwarf the income from our CV-writing services.
Eventually, I wound down the services and made advertising our sole source of revenue. This removed many of the challenges of running a service business and allowed me to focus entirely on content and SEO. A few years later, the world’s largest résumé-builder software company approached me about a direct advertising partnership. The deal guaranteed us a fixed monthly payment and increased our advertising revenue by 25%.
The next logical step was to cut out the middleman and build our own CV builder. The first version cost £30,000 and took six months to develop, but the launch failed because I had relied too heavily on my own assumptions instead of researching competitors and listening to customers.
We temporarily withdrew the product and rebuilt it with help from an experienced CV-builder consultant. This time, we focused on proven user behaviour, improved the customer experience and introduced feedback tools to learn exactly what users liked and disliked. We also replaced the one-off payment with a monthly subscription, which transformed the product’s revenue.
The biggest lesson was that a strong audience does not guarantee a successful product. You still need to understand the market, validate your assumptions and build around genuine customer feedback.
How did you build the initial version of StandOut CV?
Andrew Fennell built StandOut CV by initially starting as a freelance CV-writing service, which allowed him to gather insights directly from clients regarding their needs and preferences. He transitioned into developing a subscription-based SaaS product over the course of about a year, utilizing tools like WordPress for content management and various SEO tools to optimize visibility. The first version of the platform was a basic prototype focused on user input forms and template customization, which he rigorously tested through user feedback to identify pain points, leading to several iterations before arriving at the final product.
During the development process, Andrew faced challenges including competition within the market and the need to ensure high-quality templates that resonated with users. Throughout this phase, he placed a strong emphasis on SEO as a core strategy to drive organic traffic, using techniques such as content creation and link-building to enhance the platform's reach, proving to be a more effective approach than traditional advertising in this saturated niche.
How did you launch StandOut CV and get initial traction?
We never really had a “hard launch”. Instead, I gradually built visibility for the business by spending years publishing some of the best CV advice on the internet and promoting it in the right places. This steadily increased the website’s authority and ensured it appeared for the CV advice and service-related searches that mattered most.
For example, I would identify a search query that could attract potential customers, such as “project manager CV template”, and then create the best guide to project manager CVs I possibly could. It would include plenty of CV examples, explanatory diagrams and sample content. I would then promote the guide and earn backlinks by writing guest posts or creating infographics for job sites, news websites and other relevant publications.
I took the same in-depth approach to CV advice on YouTube. The channel eventually grew to 140,000 subscribers, built a huge amount of trust and attracted thousands of customers.
Our first sale for the original CV-writing service came around five or six months after I started working on SEO. It was from a sales manager who bought our most expensive package. At the time, I held video calls with every lead, reviewing their CV and talking them through our different packages.
I remember thinking that he seemed fairly uninterested during the call, so I never expected him to buy. I was genuinely shocked when I heard the “kerching” notification from the Shopify mobile app and saw that he had spent more than £100 with us.
The biggest lesson I learnt was patience. You cannot build a successful business overnight, regardless of how many articles claim otherwise. Establishing trust and a strong reputation takes time, particularly when your growth depends on organic traffic.
What was the growth strategy for StandOut CV and how did you scale?
StandOut CV was built almost entirely through SEO and organic content marketing. We experimented with paid advertising and social media several times, but neither ever worked particularly well for us. I found that while SEO takes a long time to gain momentum, once it starts working, the consistency and profit margins are difficult to beat. It also puts you in a strong position if you eventually want to sell the business.
It is not a clever hack or particularly glamorous, but consistently publishing genuinely helpful content for your audience -and promoting it in the right places - is the most reliable way to succeed with SEO. You also need to keep doing it for years to benefit from the compounding effect.
I eventually grew the website to more than 300,000 monthly visitors. The CV builder attracted over 23,000 paying customers and generated just over £1 million in subscription revenue, in addition to the £1 million in advertising revenue the site had generated before we built the app.
Competing with large global websites in the search results required us to step up our SEO activity. We invested in digital PR to build high-quality links at scale, hired writers to continually update our content and brought in developers to create unique custom features for the website. This became especially important as LLMs grew more popular and we needed to give people compelling reasons to visit the site directly.
In my experience, original data and research have become the most effective ways to attract links from major publications. For example, we published research about job interviews and surveyed people in the US about whether they had lied on their résumés. These studies attracted thousands of links over the years, helping us maintain strong search rankings while keeping the brand in the public eye.
Resume lying study
My image
What were the biggest lessons learned from building StandOut CV?
The entire business was a process of trial and error, so I made plenty of mistakes along the way.
- Building the CV-builder app around my own assumptions
I initially built the app without bringing in enough outside expertise or listening closely to customers. That mistake cost me tens of thousands of pounds and set us back by a year because we eventually had to rebuild the product.
- Waiting too long to hire
Because I had been the entire business at the beginning, I became accustomed to doing everything myself. I continued trying to handle too much for far too long, which ultimately slowed the company’s growth. Now, I try to hire the right people as soon as I reasonably can.
- Going too heavily into programmatic SEO
Once the website had grown significantly, I thought producing CV-example content programmatically would help us expand even further. A small number of those pages might have been useful, but we ended up publishing far more content than the site needed - and Google did not respond favourably.
We eventually carried out a major content audit and removed hundreds of pages. Traffic recovered, but it was a costly mistake that taught me not to prioritise scale over quality and genuine usefulness.
One factor outside my control -but which worked very much in my favour -was timing. When I started, there were relatively few CV builders, and none of them were publishing particularly strong content. That gave us an opportunity to get ahead by producing better resources and establishing a strong position in the market.
Today, there are far more CV and résumé platforms, and the general standard of content is much higher. I am sure it would be considerably harder to achieve the same results if I were starting again now.
My top tip when building anything is to take your time and create something you are genuinely proud of and truly believe will help people. That applies equally to your product and your website.
There are countless articles, videos and social media posts claiming that people are building multimillion-pound businesses in weeks, often by using AI to produce huge volumes of content. I do not believe that is a sustainable approach.
I use AI to speed up parts of my content-creation process, but I still take the time to make sure everything I publish is unique and genuinely helpful. Likewise, I do not rely on AI tools to send templated outreach to hundreds of people. I still contact people directly and make an effort to build real relationships.
StandOut CV Acquisition: How much did StandOut CV sell for and what was the acquisition price?
StandOut CV was acquired by a Swiss software company in April 2026 for a mid-six-figure sum, after more than 10 years of building the business.
I had previously spoken to several résumé software companies about a potential sale, but those conversations never progressed. Then, earlier in the year, I was interviewed about StandOut CV for Nathan Latka’s SaaS podcast, where I shared screenshots of our Stripe revenue.
Within a few days, the eventual buyer contacted me to say that he had seen the interview and was interested in acquiring the business.
He offered an all-cash deal that would allow me to walk away from the company completely. We negotiated a price and completed the entire deal within three months. For me, it was a great ending to the StandOut CV story.
I have since launched a SaaS SEO agency and built a new revenue-focused SEO platform for SaaS businesses called RevPages.
The idea came from frustrations I repeatedly encountered while working with SaaS SEO clients. Whenever I spoke to a potential client, I wanted to arrive at the call with clear examples of the pages we could create for them and how much revenue each one could potentially generate.
Doing that required me to analyse the website, identify suitable page ideas, collect search data from Ahrefs and use a spreadsheet to forecast the revenue each page could generate by reaching the first page of Google.
RevPages can now complete that entire process in around 90 seconds. You simply enter a SaaS website and its average customer lifetime value, and RevPages will:
- Identify a shortlist of the site’s most valuable high-intent keyword opportunities, including competitor alternatives, comparisons and best-of lists.
- Forecast how much revenue a page targeting each opportunity could generate if it reached the number-one position in Google.
- Prioritise those opportunities based on their revenue potential and likelihood of ranking.
- Turn the selected opportunities into a focused SEO roadmap, generate AI-assisted content briefs and track the revenue performance of each page.
Discover Similar Business Ideas Like StandOut CV
More about StandOut CV:
Who is the owner of StandOut CV?
Andrew Fennell is the founder of StandOut CV.
When did Andrew Fennell start StandOut CV?
2015
How much money has Andrew Fennell made from StandOut CV?
Andrew Fennell started the business in 2015, and currently makes an average of $4.32M/year.
More Case Studies Like This
Starter Story × HubSpot
Free tools for every part of your business.
Find customers, win deals, and automate the busywork with HubSpot's free tools.
