Brett Farmiloe on Reviving HARO, AI-Powered PR, and the Shift from Media Relations to Machine Relations
Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured, joins host Danielle P on Built for Success. Brett explains how Featured grew from a platform connecting experts with journalists into an AI copilot for PR.
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 12, 2026 · BUILT FOR SUCCESS · 17 MIN · FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW
How to Get Your Business Recommended by AI (Without a PR Team) | Brett Farmiloe
Bots and AI web traffic is outpacing human web traffic at this point. Within PR, the shift is going from media relations to machine relations.
Full Transcript
Lightly edited for clarity. Speaker labels retained.
Danielle P: Welcome to Built for Success. I’m Danielle P, founder of DP Global Strategies, where I help companies solve growth and operational challenges, and I’m also your host here on Built for Success. Today I’m joined by Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured. Featured connects experts with publishers looking for credible insights.
Brett has built and sold a marketing agency. He also acquired Help a Reporter Out, better known as HARO, and has built businesses around helping people share their expertise. Before all of that, Brett left a career in auditing and traveled 16,000 miles across America, interviewing hundreds of people about their careers. That experience helped shape his own business journey and eventually led him to build and grow multiple businesses. Brett, welcome to Built for Success.
Brett Farmiloe: Hey, thanks for having me on.
Danielle P: Thanks for joining me. I wanted to start with the road trip. What inspired you to do something so unconventional?
Brett Farmiloe: I majored in accounting at the University of Arizona, and I didn’t know if accounting or auditing was the right career path for me. So I decided to buy an RV, recruit a couple of friends, and travel across the country interviewing people about their career paths. We lined up interviews with companies I might want to work for and people in jobs that interested me, and we did informational interviews. We documented all of it on a career education website for other college students to learn from. The website took off, and we did a second road trip the next summer. In total it was 16,000 miles, 38 states and 300 people interviewed, from CEOs to fainting goat farmers and everyone in between. It was a very foundational experience.
Danielle P: That sounds like quite an experience.
Brett Farmiloe: Yeah, definitely.
Danielle P: You eventually went on to build and sell Markitors. What’s one of the biggest lessons from that experience that you carried into Featured?
Brett Farmiloe: Since we’re on the Built for Success podcast: the key to success is how you acquire customers and how you retain them. Markitors ranked on page one of Google for the term “digital marketing company.” That term was searched 3,900 times every month, so I knew we would get three or four new customers every month as long as we kept that page-one ranking. When you’re asking how to grow and sustain your business, it’s all about the inbound marketing channels that bring in customers. That’s what allowed me to scale the business and sell it, and it’s what let the acquirer keep relying on those channels afterward.
Danielle P: Now you have Featured. What opportunity did you see in the market that led you to create it?
Brett Farmiloe: It goes back to Markitors, where we served more than 500 small business clients. I found that every small business owner has an abundance of knowledge to share about their business, but not a lot of places to share it. The core of Featured is helping you share your expertise in a meaningful way that grows your business, while also filling a gap publishers have, which is finding a great source to quote in a story. Featured started out connecting expert sources with publishers and journalists. Since then, it has become a copilot for PR. We help people earn media across podcasts, bylined articles, journalist requests and everything in between. We also have, as you mentioned, Help a Reporter Out, or HARO, and a third brand, Connectively.
Danielle P: For someone who’s never heard of Featured, can you walk us through how the platform works?
Brett Farmiloe: Sure. Featured is a copilot for public relations. It works like a ChatGPT for PR. You show up and say, “Here’s my business, and I want to build my visibility online. How do I do it?” It searches all the media opportunities we have access to and surfaces them in a way that makes it easy for you as a business owner to take action. Think of it as a very personalized PR assistant.
Danielle P: You also acquired Help a Reporter Out, better known as HARO. What made that acquisition such an important move for Featured?
Brett Farmiloe: HARO was originally founded in 2008, and almost every PR professional or journalist has used it or heard of it. HARO was discontinued in April 2024 and rebranded to Connectively, and Connectively was discontinued in December 2024. We thought both brands could be revived and restored, so that’s what we did. We brought HARO back in April 2025, and since then we’ve sent more than 100 million emails to subscribers. HARO is a free email newsletter that goes out three times a day and connects journalists with sources. It’s an incredible way for your listeners to get free PR. Sign up for HARO and you’ll get emails with requests from journalists who need sources for stories. If you can help, just reply to the journalist and help them write their story.
Danielle P: Let’s say I’m a business owner who’s really good at what I do, but I haven’t figured out how to get more visibility or establish myself as an authority. How could I use Featured to change that?
Brett Farmiloe: Just say what’s on your mind: “I want to get PR for my business. This is my business.” As a PR copilot, Featured will walk you through the steps you need to take and connect you with relevant opportunities, both right now and going forward. Two parts of Featured work well for small business owners: the chat and the workflows. Workflows are always-on PR assistants that monitor and listen for chances to land earned media placements.
One of my favorites, which we just released, is a newsjacking workflow. If you’re not familiar with newsjacking, you say, “This is my business, and here’s me as the spokesperson. Find me relevant news stories I could comment on.” For example, take an RV rental company like Cruise America. They could say, “Here’s my spokesperson. What are the trending news stories?” Yesterday there was a story about inflation in Iowa pushing gas prices up 9% over the last few months. Cruise America could comment on that story with how people can adjust their Midwest travel plans and still take the trip despite inflation in Iowa. Featured then connects them to the Iowa Business Report, a podcast that covers Iowa news. It takes what’s happening in the world and puts you and your business into it so people can write interesting stories.
Danielle P: Can you share an example of a business owner who’s used Featured successfully, and what kind of results they achieved?
Brett Farmiloe: We have a lot of users and see a lot of use cases. The success stories come from the people who are consistent, and that’s the hardest part, because a business owner’s biggest constraint is time. You’re busy running your business, so how do you find time to act on these media opportunities? The most successful users set up workflows that do the legwork that usually takes time: identifying opportunities. We also have a feature that drafts an initial pitch based on what it knows about you and your business, so you can refine it and send it. That’s what successful users have in common: they set up the workflows, let AI do a lot of the legwork, and then they put it across the finish line.
Danielle P: What do you think most business owners misunderstand about getting media exposure and building credibility?
Brett Farmiloe: It’s about being helpful. It’s not about you, as much as you want it to be. It’s about helping a journalist do their job. A journalist has an angle they want to write about, and for better or worse, you have to fit into that angle. The acronym I always give small business owners is actually HARO’s: be helpful, be authentic, be relevant and be on time.
Being helpful means helping a journalist do their job. Being authentic means not using AI to automate 100% of this. People expect quality above what AI produces on its own, and the human touch is what gets you above that baseline. Being relevant means having the credentials to comment on the story. Being on time means remembering that the journalist has a deadline and helping them meet it. If you follow those, you get out of the “it’s about me” mindset. It’s actually about being helpful, authentic, relevant and on time for that journalist.
Danielle P: Looking at Featured over the next 12 months, what are the biggest goals you’re working toward?
Brett Farmiloe: We’ve done an incredible job building up opportunities. There are 814,000 podcasts in Featured, more than 13,000 awards programs and 65,000 journalists. We also added Substacks this week, so you can now reach 38,000 of them. All of this is available by typing a prompt, but it still requires you to type a prompt. The next step for us is that business owners want to build their business. They don’t necessarily want to type things in all the time.
So for us, it’s about connecting all those opportunities to the activity already happening in a business. If you’re in software and pushing code to a GitHub repo, how do you track the features you just deployed? If you run a Shopify store and just added a new product or collection, how does Featured detect that and connect it to actual PR campaigns? We’re working toward a more complete PR system that connects to your everyday business activity.
Danielle P: So essentially, you’re looking to connect Featured to what’s already going on in someone’s business.
Brett Farmiloe: Totally. There are all these tools, whether that’s an e-commerce store, a project management tool or a GitHub repository, that give off important signals as a normal part of the work. Featured then identifies what’s newsworthy, ranks it as tier one, tier two or tier three, and connects you to the right opportunities. For a business owner, it’s like having an incredible PR assistant beside you at every step inside your company, smart enough to connect you to the right things and get you better AI visibility.
Danielle P: What’s been the biggest challenge in getting Featured to the next level?
Brett Farmiloe: We’ve been at it for a while. We started the company in January 2022, originally as Terkel. We acquired Featured.com and rebranded, then we acquired HARO, then we revived Connectively. We’ve done it all with a team of seven, so we can all go to lunch together in a minivan. Running three brands with a team of seven is a substantial lift. The biggest challenge is focus. There are so many things you could be doing. You have to get real with yourself: here are the things that will move the needle, here’s how we’ll measure whether they do, and then keep fighting another day.
Danielle P: If you could eliminate one bottleneck in the business today, what would make the biggest difference in growth for Featured?
Brett Farmiloe: Everything is so decentralized. One trend I’m seeing is that a PR professional may subscribe to eight or nine different tools, and those tools don’t talk to each other. A PR professional was visiting our office yesterday, and I asked if I could take a photo of her browser bar, because I had never seen so many tabs open in one window. I don’t even know if you could click on them. There were 38 tabs open, probably more. That’s the reality for a PR professional today: click, click, click, go, go, go. It should all be centralized in one place. There are a lot of barriers and bottlenecks to that kind of connectivity. That’s the world we’re moving into, but it doesn’t exist yet.
Danielle P: You’ve had quite the journey, from building and selling a business to growing Featured, and I’m sure you’ve learned a lot along the way. Looking back, what was one pivotal decision that had the biggest impact on your success?
Brett Farmiloe: Acquiring HARO is a pretty big one. It also goes back to the lesson of going from Terkel to Featured.com. When we do direct outreach to someone, it’s easier when our brand carries more trust and credibility. That’s a good lesson for every business: when you reach out to someone, what shows up about you online? When someone puts your company into ChatGPT, Claude or Google, what comes back?
That’s why business owners need to invest in their core message. Your prospects are doing that research. And the way people get referred to a business has changed too. Customer referrals have always been the top source of new business. A referral used to mean tapping you: “Hey, Danielle, who do you know?” Now I’m tapping Claude and ChatGPT: “You know a lot about me, you’re my personalized recommender. Who should I go to for this product or service?” Referrals have shifted dramatically because they now come through a trusted assistant. That’s one reason business owners really need to think about how they show up in AI.
Danielle P: For founders and business leaders building and growing companies today, what’s the one thing you believe they absolutely cannot afford to overlook?
Brett Farmiloe: AI visibility, building on what I just said. We’re living through a dramatic shift in how people get connected to information. It’s a lot like going from the library to the internet. Back in the day, you had to talk to a librarian and spend hours going through books. Then you could just go to “www.” Now you don’t even have to go to “www.” It’s all right there in an app, and that’s how people find information. Bots and AI web traffic are outpacing human web traffic at this point. That’s a huge shift. Within PR, the shift is going from media relations to machine relations, and we’re all trying to find our footing.
Danielle P: Brett, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for sharing your journey and helping our audience understand how they can use Featured. For anyone who wants to learn more about Featured or connect with you, where’s the best place to go?
Brett Farmiloe: You can go to featured.com. You can go to helpareporter.com and sign up for HARO. You can also go to connectively.us. And I’m available on LinkedIn.
Danielle P: Perfect. Thank you again, Brett, for joining me on Built for Success. And to everyone listening, thank you for tuning in.
About the Show
Built for Success is hosted by Danielle P, founder of DP Global Strategies, a firm that helps companies solve growth and operational challenges. On each episode, Danielle talks with founders and business leaders about how they built their companies, what drives growth, and the decisions that made the biggest difference.
About Featured
Featured is an AI co-pilot for public relations (PR) that helps communications professionals and subject matter experts find earned media opportunities, draft responses, and secure coverage across journalist requests, podcasts, bylined articles, speaking engagements, awards, and other PR opportunities. The company owns and operates HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and Connectively, which connect journalists and publishers with subject matter experts. Featured supports more than 100,000 users and helps publishers fill content gaps with expert insights.
Media contact
Brett Farmiloe
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Featured (Terkel, Inc. d/b/a Featured)
press@featured.com