← SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Founder uses Genius Playbook to hit $1M revenue with no employees
00:25:34
Loading summary
Transcript103 lines
- [00:00]
A
What it's doing monthly today, on average.
- [00:02]
B
I think it's about 30k MRI at.
- [00:03]
A
The moment, growing this business to 18 million visitors and over a million pounds of revenue.
- [00:09]
B
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.
- [00:20]
A
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 screen, show proof of what they're doing and, 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 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 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?
- [00:56]
B
Yes. Thanks very much for having me.
- [00:59]
A
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 this space?
- [01:07]
B
Well, I wouldn't say I really picked it. I guess it kind of, it picks 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 and I started to get a few clients through that, I started the website. Initially it was a CV writing service website, but basically over the years it made more sense to move to an advertising business model and then finally to an app.
- [01:52]
A
Interesting. Okay, so can I view the app on my screen here somewhere?
- [01:56]
B
Yeah, yeah. So see CV build 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 CV now and you can essentially pick templates, change the colors, all that kind of thing, add pre written content, Bing, bing, bang.
- [02:12]
A
Okay, what happens at the end?
- [02:15]
B
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 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, It's a monthly 1695 per month.
- [02:41]
A
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 it accurate?
- [02:45]
B
That's because we haven't got around to putting AI yet. So we're in the, 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 are, we're working on it.
- [02:59]
A
I see. Well, so why would people use this over just like exporting their LinkedIn profile?
- [03:04]
B
Because so essentially the. Well there's a couple of reasons really. So firstly just the sheer amount of traffic we get through to the website and the whole kind of ethos behind the site is we put so much free and helpful info out there that we kind of build trust with people and then they come through to the, to the builder. And also, and we guys, we can.
- [03:26]
A
Look at that here. You 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, I mean we can see here Domain Rating 73. Very, very, very strong domain rating.
- [03:35]
B
Yes.
- [03:35]
A
Organic Traffic looks like about 60000 per month, right?
- [03:38]
B
Yeah, it's a bit more than that. Agrefs is not always 100% accurate. 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.
- [03:55]
A
And tell me about this specific strat. 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?
- [04:05]
B
Yeah, sure. Do you want me to share that now?
- [04:07]
A
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. I mean, 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.
- [04:28]
B
Yeah, so we, 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 of 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 no, actually on PeoplePerHour, 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 spend the next two to three years learning SEO, creating helpful content, building the right kind of backlinks. But it was a slow growth. Probably took a good year or so to really take off.
- [05:25]
A
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?
- [05:31]
B
Yeah. So annoyingly it's saying that the graph won't load. Let me just.
- [05:36]
A
Are these people paying you monthly recurring or do you have to get new sales every month from new customers?
- [05:40]
B
So 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 MRI terms to fluctuate. So we do. We do rely on new customers coming in.
- [05:55]
A
Okay, let's focus on the screen for a second. Say at the bottom if you're. If you're comfortable doing this. Yeah, sure. Subscriber lifetime value $67.43 lbs 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. When the purple line was zero.
- [06:10]
B
Yes.
- [06:11]
A
Bottom left graph.
- [06:12]
B
What we did with that is. So initially when I first started the app. Um, so we're not going to have to.
- [06:18]
A
Well, Andrew, I want, I want people to see the timeline. Can you hover over that line graph in the bottom left of your screen, subscriber life and 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. Right there.
- [06:28]
B
Yeah.
- [06:28]
A
So this was the purple line. Yeah, yeah. So this was 2021.
- [06:33]
B
Yes.
- [06:33]
A
You start driving up lifetime value. So tell us how your pricing evolved over time to drive this up.
- [06:38]
B
Yes. So essentially I had the app developed after we'd. After we'd built up revenue from advertising and I decided it was the right time to build our. 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 because people were buying once for £15 and then not coming back again. So basically we switched to a subscription model and that massively increased the revenue.
- [07:21]
A
That's, that's amazing. Let's go, let's do the chart at the center top here. Subscriber turn rate, it spiked that 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?
- [07:36]
B
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 bare bones products and we only had one template and very basic features. And what we did is we put a survey if anybody ever 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 keep people on board for longer over time.
- [08:14]
A
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@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@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 4 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.
- [09:02]
B
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 you go. And if you don't cancel in that period, you go on to the full subscription, which is 1695amonth. So that's people who convert from that, from that very cheap paid trial into the full subscription.
- [09:26]
A
I see, so the cheap paid into full subscription. Okay, so okay, 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? Comfortable sharing just total revenue you've collected life to date, like all time?
- [09:41]
B
Yes, of course, yeah. If I scroll up here, this, this here is the total gross volume that we've generated with the app since creation.
- [09:54]
A
Which is between what year and what year?
- [09:56]
B
That's in about four years.
- [09:59]
A
Cool. So between 20, sorry, 2020 and 2025 you've done a million pounds and is this. You sold one?
- [10:06]
B
So I just like to say I actually do a lot of the link building but they, they supplement it, but very well. So they're a company called Root Digital who are based here in the uk.
- [10:15]
A
Can you show me their website?
- [10:16]
B
I kind of did.
- [10:19]
A
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 actually doing backlinking, well, they're doing something creative. What are you doing?
- [10:35]
B
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 move towards.
- [10:42]
A
Yes.
- [10:43]
B
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 reluctant to it now. They find it spammy, so they don't, they don't really want to engage in it. So it can, can still get you some of the way. But what, what we've moved to now, a more natural piece of good, useful piece of content that naturally attract links and that 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.
- [11:38]
A
Can you show us an example by the way, while you give the story?
- [11:41]
B
Yeah, I can indeed. Yep. So let me just, I'll give you, give you one of each. So just go to.
- [11:58]
A
Now guys, I'm going to give you the Ahref 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 is 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 hit so many backlinks?
- [12:22]
B
Sorry, which page is that, Nathan?
- [12:25]
A
That's what you're on right now. Just your stat. No, not your blog, your stats blog page.
- [12:30]
B
All the stats page. So it says stats.
- [12:33]
A
It's like, Sorry, let me just. Job interview statistics.
- [12:38]
B
Which statistics? Sorry.
- [12:41]
A
For it's, it's your, it's your URL that's standout. CV.com forward/stats. Forward/job interview statistics stats page. Not your blog.
- [12:51]
B
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 re reputable sources all across the Internet and we put them all in one place and we title 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 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.
- [14:05]
A
Most people think to get a good SEO page it needs 6,000 words. But this article is only 1035 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.
- [14:17]
B
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 it's the number one thing that we use. So that's an 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.
- [14:40]
A
Okay.
- [14:43]
B
Okay. So they did this for us. So this is how many people are 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, 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 of the big U.S. news sites.
- [15:36]
A
So how do you pay Root for this? Is it a fixed fee per month or pay per backlink or how do you pay that?
- [15:41]
B
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 have started to do a per campaign one now. But it's relatively expensive. But it's really, really worth because you get the best links you're ever going to get. They're natural, they're relevant. The exact kind of links that Google really wants you to get, how expensive?
- [16:07]
A
What do you pay them per month?
- [16:09]
B
I'm not sure if I should say that.
- [16:14]
A
What's a range?
- [16:15]
B
So for basic like digital PR and those kind of services, you probably be looking at least like 2000amonth. 2000 GBP.
- [16:26]
A
Okay, so is it fair to say you're paying them somewhere between 2 grand and 10,000amonth?
- [16:31]
B
Yeah. So yeah, in that range at the moment.
- [16:34]
A
Yeah, that's a big range. Right. So we left enough ambiguity there. Right. Where it's not, it's not too revealing, but okay, that's helpful.
- [16:40]
B
Yeah.
- [16:40]
A
Let's go over to your search console performance because ultimately all this SEO traffic, what you want be seeing is organic clicks from Google. So can we first off, can we zoom out and Go to. Are you custom this? Is this the last 16 months? Can we go to last 16 months?
- [16:51]
B
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, 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.
- [17:06]
A
But this is, but this is only going through 2024. Are. 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?
- [17:15]
B
No, no, I can't show you from there onwards because of the buyers.
- [17:21]
A
Oh, is this what you told me before the show? Oh, got it. Okay. Did it generally get worse or better though in 2025?
- [17:28]
B
It probably stayed around the same, to be honest.
- [17:31]
A
Okay, okay. All right, so take me back when you hover over your, your highest blue line peak. This is the. Guys, 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. 7,005. 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? You mentioned the backlinks, you mentioned the big articles. Anything else driving this traffic?
- [18:01]
B
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 going to 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 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 what the site is mainly made up of. And one thing that we now like to do is add features that you can't get from ChatGPT. So here you can click on the CV 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 click 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 going to encourage them to actually visit you.
- [19:24]
A
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 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? 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, right? These are like programmatic, you know, playbooks here, right, Andrew?
- [20:00]
B
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 enabled us to essentially type in job titles. And then I got a developer to write this Python tool and 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 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 create a lot of content at scale. But we pushed it a little bit too far and I took my off the ball a little bit and 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 obviously exactly the same thing. So programmatic SEO is good, but you have to keep an eye on it and you have to make sure the content is still quality. Otherwise. What happened with 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, it's very good. But use it sparingly.
- [21:58]
A
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 chat. GPT in 2025, about average position. Okay. Service for a flat. Okay, so nothing shocking in here, right? No, no.
- [22:19]
B
Yeah.
- [22:20]
A
Okay, cool. This is, this is super helpful. Thanks for showing also 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?
- [22:32]
B
Yeah, so it's, it's doing around. I think it's about 30k MRI at the moment.
- [22:39]
A
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?
- [22:46]
B
Yeah, maybe not for, for that much, but certainly open to looking for buyers at the moment. Yeah.
- [22:53]
A
And why is that? Why do you want to potentially sell this? You have another idea you want to move to or what?
- [22:57]
B
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 Santa CV is running pretty passively at the moment, but still, still with some of my involvement. So we're in talks with a couple of different resume builder companies. One big one in the US actually. So I'm hoping to sell it in the next six months to a year.
- [23:27]
A
I mean, what do you, are you contrasting, do you think it's going to be a $500,000, a million dollar price? What sort of multiple are you looking for?
- [23:34]
B
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 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 6,700k in sterling range.
- [24:02]
A
And so if someone offered you $600,000, all cash to buy the business, but a chunk of that cash, 200,000 was up front and the rest is paid out to you as 30% of profits until you're paid the, you know, the 600K. Would you be open to a structure like that?
- [24:15]
B
Potentially, yeah.
- [24:17]
A
Interesting. Well, we'll have to see where that goes. Let's give some love to your new agency. What is the website up for your SEO agency?
- [24:23]
B
Yeah, sure. So it's linqwest.co.uk. as I said, we are an SEO agency that specialize in SEO for SaaS businesses. Because SaaS businesses are often quite complex, especially in the B2B space. They, it's a, it's, 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.
- [24:57]
A
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, website, CV builder, right. CV builder.com and standout hyphen cv.com and you know, over a million dollars of total sales. He's increased average sale price up to $6162. That's lifetime value. Pardon me. Scaled up nicely. And now saying, man, do we sell this thing for 500 6,000, 600,000 bucks? We'll see what happens. But his main go to market motion over 50 million impressions generated from his website using really smart SEO tactics. Andrew, thank you for taking us to the top.