Andrew Fennell spent about ten years in recruitment, helping companies hire, before he started StandOut CV. He had a hunch that search traffic could bring a steady stream of job seekers to a CV advice site and resume builder, but he had no SEO knowledge and was working from a brand new domain. His first attempt to shortcut the work backfired: he paid a cheap freelancer £200 for ten backlinks, got nothing useful, and decided the only reliable option was to learn the craft himself.

From there he treated content as the core of the business. He wrote articles answering the questions job seekers actually search for, then slowly turned that into a repeatable process with a small team handling the heavy lifting. Over the years StandOut CV accumulated more than 1,000 articles, which now pull in thousands of visitors a day with little ongoing maintenance. The library became the top of a simple funnel: helpful CV advice, then clear calls to action pointing readers toward the free builder.

He paired the content with patient link building rather than buying links in bulk. Early on he pitched small job sites and career blogs with useful articles in exchange for a link, took a lot of rejections, and built up a network of guest posting partners. That early credibility eventually opened doors to contributor slots at bigger names like Forbes, Fast Company and The Guardian. He also ran original data studies, including a survey on how many people lie on their CVs, which got picked up by high-authority outlets and earned strong backlinks plus a wave of exposure.

The product itself was built to remove friction. Visitors can assemble a complete CV for free and only pay when they want to download the finished document, so they try everything before committing. Combined with the traffic, that conversion-friendly model carried the business to more than 18 million visitors and 23,000 paying customers, reaching roughly £40K in monthly recurring revenue with SEO as the only traffic source and no outside funding.

By 2025 StandOut CV was running lean with two employees and a part-time agency, and Fennell had started a separate SEO agency to help other SaaS and tech companies copy the same playbook. His story is a reminder that organic search rewards consistency over speed: the compounding only shows up after years of publishing and link building that most founders abandon too early.