I had the pleasure of talking to Brett Farmiloe, CEO/Founder of Featured, which connects subject-matter experts with top publishers to increase their exposure and create quality, ready-to-publish Q&A content. Featured is part of the StartupAZ cohort.
I'm pretty simple and boring. I work, spend time with family, call close friends as much as I can, and ride a road bike to stay in shape. That's about it.
My kids are 10, 7, and 4. I'm about the minivan life on the weekends, and live in "Office 96" out of Industrious Fashion Square during the week.
I'm proud that I've built and sold a company, privileged to have visited all 50 states, and pumped to pull together pieces of the last 17 years and put them into Featured.
I started my career as an auditor after majoring in accounting. I founded a career education website that sent myself and three friends on a couple of cross-country tours in RVs, where we interviewed 300+ people about their career paths and documented their stories for others to learn from. Wrote a book about it and became a published author, where I spent time giving keynotes from Alaska to Miami. I then helped the actor Hugh Jackman launch a charitable coffee company that was acquired by Keurig. After that I started an SEO agency for small businesses. Ran that for 10 years, and experienced the problem that we're solving with Featured.
When I was ten years old I blazed a trail through a forest from my house to my friend's house. It took all day, and my friend and I both ended up with the worst cases of poison oak. But, that sense of adventure and fun has never left me, and blazing a trail that solves a problem for our customers is pretty much what our team and I do each day.
Ride road bikes. PHX is a grid, where all routes connect. Going on long rides is a great way to physically stay in shape, and mentally build up founder muscles around grit and longevity.
"Poolside Miami Chill" on Pandora. Before that, it was the W Hotels "Wet Deck" mix before they pulled the playlist from the platform.
For the last decade I ran a digital marketing agency that served more than 500 small business clients. Every client had the problem of needing to build visibility online, and lacked resources to help them be found online by prospective customers.
But, each client had an abundance of expertise to share. So, we created a Q&A platform that allowed small businesses to answer questions related to their expertise. We’d then get their insights placed in articles to help them build their visibility and credibility online.
We named the platform Terkel, which to us meant to “give voice to the uncelebrated.” Terkel took off faster than the agency, so I sold the agency at the end of 2021 and started to focus on Terkel full-time to kick off 2022.
Opportunity. And, a few other things.
Featured is a descriptive word that clearly communicates our value proposition and reduces the time it takes to understand what we do. Overall, we felt that we’d be able to build a better and bigger business, faster with Featured.
There were a few issues with the name, Terkel, as well. We needed a name with recognition and recall, and Terkel was prone to misspellings and mispronunciations. We also needed the dot com, which we were never going to be able to get.
Rebranding was a tough decision. But no matter which way I looked at it, Featured was a better fit for our customers, partners, and long-term direction for our company.
There wasn’t much of a process. Opportunity knocked. When we first named the platform Terkel, I had also submitted my contact information for Featured.com. At the time, the domain was up for sale and I wanted my contact information on file for the future in case of any advancements.
Low and behold, about three years after expressing interest in the domain, the owner reached out to see if I was still interested in acquiring it. I let the Featured name sit with me for a few days, and made the decision to move forward.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ib693FrTh7Q
Probably myself, and getting in the way of the experts.
We hired a branding agency who I’d highly recommend, Attic Salt, and have a VP of Marketing internally who has lots of relevant branding experience. And then you have me, who doesn’t know or care to understand the difference between a Serif and Sans Serif font.
There were two occasions when I almost ruined the rebrand. The first was when I wanted to launch a month earlier than we did. The second was that I liked the ALL CAPS logo, which didn’t fit with the branding concept we went with.
On both occasions, I was lucky that I trusted our team more than me. Otherwise I think I would have messed it up, and Featured would have arrived at a different destination.
There’s a saying in Sonoma County, where I’m from, that “the best grapes grow in short soil.” Meaning that to get the best wine, you need to stress the vine.
I didn’t know this when we started, but after the Featured launch our branding agency said that a rebrand like the one we did typically takes between 4-6 months. We did everything in two months.
The experience of rebranding quickly was pretty stressful. But overall, I think the team was able to produce their best work because of - or maybe in spite of - the constraints.
Another founder once told me, “It’ll take twice as long, and cost twice as much to get halfway through your worst case scenario.”
That saying rings true with most startup related things, and a rebrand is no exception.
See the above statement. I’m glad I didn’t know how hard a startup would be. Otherwise, I may not have started.
It reminds me of one of my favorite stories and analogies, which is about baby fainting goats. If you’ve watched a YouTube video, you’ll know that fainting goats actually “faint” when they’re scared. They get a boost of adrenaline and it freezes up their joints, causing them to fall over or get temporarily paralyzed.
The thing is that baby fainting goats don’t faint, because they’re fearless. They haven’t learned fear yet, so they don’t have that boost of adrenaline when they get scared.
With that analogy in mind, I’m thankful I didn’t know more before starting Featured. It’s allowed us to move fast as a company, make bold decisions, and keep moving forward.
Most people believe that search engines have all the answers, but the reality is that a very limited amount of our knowledge is online. I hope that Featured unlocks new knowledge so that we can improve the information the world can access. And I hope the rebrand just accelerates us towards that vision.
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