Help a Reporter Out (HARO) Blog

HARO is still worth using in 2026, but the platform is taking a more active approach to spam, low-quality submissions, and accounts that violate its guidelines. According to HARO CEO Brett Farmiloe, HARO bans an account every 23 minutes, using community reporting, automated signals, and internal review to identify problematic activity. The goal is to preserve the simple journalist-source model that made HARO valuable while rebuilding the quality and trust that had declined over time.

HARO’s revival is about rebuilding trust

Help a Reporter Out, better known as HARO, has been part of the PR industry’s vocabulary for nearly two decades. The original model was remarkably simple: journalists submitted requests for sources, and experts or PR professionals responded when they could provide something genuinely useful.

That simplicity was also part of the problem.

As Farmiloe explains, HARO did not disappear because it was suddenly a failing concept. Rather, the platform experienced a gradual decline in quality and trust. The same low-friction system that made it easy for journalists to find sources also made it vulnerable to spam, fake profiles, mass pitching, and other forms of abuse.

Featured acquired and revived HARO in 2025, bringing the familiar brand and email-based journalist request model back to the PR industry. It also acquired Connectively and incorporated both brands into a broader vision for Featured as an AI co-pilot for public relations.

The challenge is not simply bringing HARO back. It is making the format work at scale without allowing the problems that contributed to its decline to return.

Farmiloe says one important part of that effort is enforcement: HARO bans an account every 23 minutes.

That enforcement is not based on a single automated rule. HARO uses community reports and other signals to identify accounts that may be violating its guidelines, with an internal team reviewing reports and determining whether an account should receive a warning, face a ban, or require no action.

For journalists, the objective is a cleaner source pool. For PR professionals and experts, it means the platform remains useful only when responses are relevant, authentic, and genuinely helpful.

How HARO screens pitches and accounts

Farmiloe describes the current HARO system as a combination of technology and human judgment.

Community reporting is one part of the process. Journalists can flag a response as unhelpful, sending that report to Featured’s internal team for review. The company also looks for broader patterns of behavior that can indicate accounts are not using the system according to its guidelines.

That distinction is important. Farmiloe says a single signal does not automatically result in a permanent ban.

Instead, signals are considered together. The company can warn a user, ban an account, or dismiss a report depending on the circumstances.

The result is a more active moderation model than the original HARO could provide.

And according to Farmiloe, that is necessary because some users have built entire operations around sending large volumes of responses to HARO opportunities.

The broader conversation is also changing because AI has made it easier than ever to produce those responses at scale. HARO says it screens pitches for AI-generated content, but Farmiloe emphasizes that AI detection is only one signal among several—not an automatic reason to permanently ban an account.

Is HARO still worth using in 2026?

For PR professionals, subject-matter experts, and brands that can provide genuinely relevant expertise, the answer from Farmiloe’s perspective is yes.

But HARO is not a volume-based media strategy.

The value comes from matching the right source to the right journalist request and providing an answer that is useful enough to make it into the story. That requires judgment and relevance—two things that cannot simply be replaced by sending more pitches.

That philosophy fits into Featured’s broader vision for PR technology.

Farmiloe sees the modern PR workflow as increasingly fragmented across journalist request platforms, podcasts, newsletters, social networks, media databases, and other sources of opportunity. Featured is designed to consolidate those opportunities and use AI to surface the ones that are most relevant.

HARO is one piece of that larger system.

The platform’s revival also reflects something less technological: journalists still need sources, and experts still need credible opportunities to share their knowledge.

The format works. The challenge is maintaining trust.

The full Comms Confidential transcript

The following is the full transcript of the conversation with Brett Farmiloe on Comms Confidential. It has been cleaned for readability, with timestamps and conversational filler removed where appropriate, while preserving the substance of the discussion.

You’ve founded four different companies. You’re an entrepreneur, you had an agency at one point, an SEO agency, I believe — Marketors. We’ll talk about that. You incorporated PR into it. Talk about what that was like, why you built that agency, and the PR part of it.

Yeah. Well, my background — I’m a financial auditor. That’s where I started my career and wasn’t sure that that was the path for me.

So I decided to hop in an RV with three friends and cruise around the country, interviewing people about their career paths. We did about 300 interviews across 38 states and 16,000 miles, and found out that people don’t have really a meaningful outlet to share their expertise and experience.

And that’s been at the core of the last couple decades for me in terms of the businesses that I’ve started and the adventures that I’ve been on.

With the digital marketing company, I actually didn’t really intend to start an agency. I was a freelancer. I had a few clients, and I got my website to rank on page one of Google for the term “digital marketing company.” And then actually started a digital marketing company.

We serviced more than 500 small business clients over the course of 10 years. And again, this theme that kept repeating is I would come across these business owners that were incredibly knowledgeable about their business, whether that’s eyelash extension supplies or equipment financing and all these different things, but they didn’t have anywhere to share that expertise.

And so we wanted to create opportunities for those folks to be able to answer questions and have their insights be used in meaningful ways.

That led me to essentially found Featured.com.

For the audience that’s maybe unaware, what is Featured? What are you guys doing? We’ll talk about the acquisitions in a bit, but I’ve heard of it as an AI co-pilot for PR. What do you think? What’s your vision for Featured?

Yeah. So originally — and this kind of goes into the historical context as well — originally it was a decentralized Quora, essentially a decentralized question-and-answer site.

The premise was, well, why is Quora outranking HR.com for a human resources-related question? It’s because HR.com doesn’t have the content.

So what if we just took the question and routed the answers to HR.com and all these other publishers and had that outrank a Q&A site?

And so that’s where it started. We operated like that pretty consistently for about four and a half years, where we were getting requests from publishers for content, journalists for sources.

And with the acquisition of Help a Reporter Out and of Connectively, and reviving those brands, we pivoted Featured to being a co-pilot for public relations.

Really, it was on a couple different problems that we consistently heard. One is there’s not enough opportunities, and two, there’s not enough time.

And so we wanted to centralize all of these different media opportunities across podcasts, journalists, journalist requests, bylined articles, awards, speaking opportunities — put that all into one different platform that makes it really easy to query in just a natural language and then gets all these opportunities back so that PR professionals can take action on it.

So we’re about a one month in.

One month in. So you’ve got a lot of runway to play with.

You’re talking about having all the queries being able to almost be a dedicated PR LLM, if you will. As a PR professional, why am I going to take that, put it in my pitch? What am I actually going to do with it where I can actually get the output that’s going to make me better on the day-to-day?

Yeah. So I think if you zoom into the day-to-day where a PR professional is spending their time, they’re spending their time subscribed to multiple different journalist request platforms, whether that’s Help a Reporter Out or others.

It’s scanning all these different Substacks and LinkedIn posts and monitoring journalists and trying to build relationships and doing all of these things in a fragmented way.

And so the thought and premise is, well, if you’re spending five hours just doing monitoring, why not have an LLM or AI do a lot of that monitoring, help you surface the stuff that you really need to take action on, so that you could focus your time on strategy, building relationships, having good judgment to take action on your strategies?

So I think that’s the opportunity. PR is such a fragmented space where you’re looking across so many different places. Why not just have one or two places that really help you with your efforts?

Gotcha. So it’s more about consolidating the surfaces we all have to go to, whether it’s Cision, Muck Rack, Sprinklr, Substack, podcasts, all of the things.

You name it, man. You pick a category. I need to pitch podcasts. Okay, great. This one little small sliver of PR, there’s like four or five or six different tools that do that one thing.

And so when I talk with PR professionals, they’re like, look, I’ve got like eight or nine subscriptions to stuff right now, and I’m using all these different tools, and none of them really talk to each other and none of them integrate with each other, and it makes my life super difficult for reporting purposes and all this stuff.

So that’s kind of the gap that we’re looking to fill. We just hear how frustrated PR practitioners are with their current workflows and tech stack, and we think that there’s an opportunity there.

You mentioned podcasts. We’re on a podcast, but you did something interesting where you built a database of more than three-quarters of a million — I think the number is around 815,000 active podcasts. I have never seen a podcast database before, to be honest. It’s one of those things like Substack where it feels a little bit like pitching into the wind without knowing where to go. How did you — that could have been a huge manual task, so I’m assuming it wasn’t manual — but how did you identify what was an active podcast? What was a red flag for a podcast that’s not worth pitching? How did you actually build that database out?

Yeah. So we took a look at 5 million podcasts and we whittled that down to 814,000 active podcasts, which were — I believe the definition was any episode within the last 60 days. It could have been 30 days, but that was essentially what “active” means.

And so, yeah, the thing that’s amazing about that — no matter what, this is the product that demos the best for us — is you can go in and type, “Find me a podcast about virtually anything,” and it’s going to come back with some different shows that you could potentially pitch yourself to be a guest on.

So, yeah, I think 814,000 is a really strong market and gives a lot of opportunity.

And then you zoom back from that with journalists. We’ve got about 75,000 journalists that have Help a Reporter Out profiles. And that’s going from 800,000 to 75,000 journalists.

And I think we’ve got about 7,000 or 8,000 bylined article publishers — publishers that accept op-eds and contributed content.

And I think that collectively this makes up for a really interesting set that PR professionals could take interest in.

Are you going to do the same thing that you did for podcasts with Substack and Beehiiv in the newsletter industry?

Like, this is what I’ve been working on this week. I put out a HARO, and my HARO was, “What is PR in 2026?” Because it’s not one thing anymore. It is so many different things.

And so I spent the entire week, probably like 40 customer interviews with PR practitioners, being like, “What’s working for you? What are you doing?”

And obviously one recurring theme that keeps coming up more and more often is the shape of the media that you’re seeing. Journalists get laid off from a publication and turn to Substack, and they’ve got an independent publication that now has subscribers.

So, yeah, a huge need for PR professionals is, well, how do I reach the right Substacks? How do I find the newsletters where there’s an engaged audience?

The job to be done within PR — that is just one of many — and it’s probably one of the most rising, most important tasks to be completed.

I couldn’t agree more.

I mean, I remember when Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher left All Things D and created Recode, and that was like the first moment of independent journalism, I think.

Now, granted, they had backers and they had a team, but they were banking on their names that they helped build All Things D under.

And I think now it’s just — you see Jeffrey Fowler from The Washington Post, Joanna Stern from The Wall Street Journal. It’s just taken a life of its own.

I think every journalist is an entrepreneur at this point.

Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve seen a lot of PR people go that route too. They want to go the consultant route. They build that out as a brand.

Meredith in the media has done a great job building her own business by interviewing journalists and giving that insight back to PR people.

Let’s talk about this. You brought HARO back in 2025. I remember when it started. Was it 2007-ish?

In a Facebook group in 2007.

Yes. And then you’ve also brought back Connectively in 2026. You bought Connectively. What are you seeing in these media brands that have kind of gone dormant? I’m not going to say they were dead, but they’ve gone dormant. And why are you bringing them back as part of Featured and part of this AI co-pilot?

Yeah. Well, I think that each one has a separate reason.

So, you start with Help a Reporter Out, founded in 2007 or 2008, and I don’t know if I’ve ever met a PR professional who hasn’t heard of HARO.

Plain and simple.

And since acquiring it, reviving it, I’ve had hundreds of calls with different PR practitioners talking about HARO. All of them have like the nostalgic story for it — that maybe they were getting started in their career, maybe they needed a win for a client that was on the ropes, and all this different stuff.

So when it was announced that it was discontinued and then rebranded to Connectively, and then Connectively was discontinued, it just felt like there was an opportunity there.

So anyways, we put a deal across and we revived HARO.

And one of the most interesting things that we actually saw was we were thinking about bringing the website back. It was the Friday afternoon at like 3:30, and we were going to announce the revival on Tuesday, and we wanted to make sure that the website actually could go live.

So we just hit publish as a test, and within two minutes we had like 15 subscribers.

The best signal you could get. And it was like, “Whoa, this is crazy.”

So anyways, HARO is a great brand. And I think that when you look at journalist request platforms, Peter Shankman, who started it, actually started another platform called Sources of Sources, SOS, and it was recognizing that this is the perfect format for a journalist request service to connect journalists with sources.

An email format is perfect. There’s no platform, there’s no friction, there’s no signup. It’s just a daily, three-times-a-day summary of all these different journalists who need sources.

You can reply back to the journalists directly if you could be helpful, and it’s like the perfect way to connect people.

So, in bringing it back, I’ve contributed stories and I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’ve talked with journalists that have done it, and it’s just incredible who you can get connected with.

Yeah. Look, you said everyone’s nostalgic for it, and I can attest to that just given the fact that I remember the Facebook group.

It was something we always checked. It was, I think, three times a day at the time when it started hitting email, and we’d all — I was working at an agency — we’d all compare notes and see like, okay, who do we have for this? Who do we have for that?

It didn’t just act as the inbound, but it actually created community within the agency setting or wherever you were.

It’s only been a little while that you’ve flipped it on and you said you got 15 subscribers right off the bat — great signal. Obviously, people wanted it. How did you get the journalists to come back and start putting in inquiries and whatnot?

Flipped on the light switch — HARO’s back. Really, it was just that simple.

People — because a lot, I would assume a lot of journalists in the 20 years since it started have kind of gone by the wayside, maybe moved on to different parts of their career.

Look, it’s an unmet need. You need sources for stories, and if you don’t get the source that you need every single time from a particular platform, you’re always open to alternatives.

And so when we said HARO’s back, great. Let me give it a try again.

And then earning those opportunities and delivering on that with results is what has made it have a comeback.

So I think that that’s significant.

And it hasn’t all been roses. It wasn’t like HARO was a thriving asset and it suddenly got shut down. It was a slow decay and it was a huge decline in quality and trust.

I mentioned the format of why it works. It’s also so simple that it’s so open to spam and it’s so open to profiles that aren’t real and all of this stuff that we have to face on the back end of inheriting and reviving this.

It’s not roses, but it’s the perfect format to actually execute.

And so for us behind the scenes, it means that we’ve got to build in a bunch of safeguards to maintain the quality and trust.

What are some of those safeguards, if you can share, or what are some of the hiccups you’ve run into since rolling the brand back out that you could talk about?

Yeah. So I guess some of the different stuff we check — AI. We do AI detection on every single pitch that goes to the HARO platform.

And we find that 21% of all pitches on HARO are 100% AI-generated.

And so we thought that AI detection would be a really strong signal. It is.

We see that 35% of journalists opt out of receiving AI pitches entirely. So when they submit a request for a source, there’s a little checkbox that says, “Don’t send me AI pitches.”

And that’s not checked by default. People check it 35% of the time, and we exclude and withhold those 100% AI-detected pitches.

So we use a company called Pangram for that. We feel it’s the strongest AI detection tool on the market.

With that said, there’s false positives and false negatives, but at least it’s something as a signal in the middle.

We also ban a HARO account every 23 minutes.

And what I mean by that — this is more safeguards and signals within the system where we have community reporting. A journalist can essentially mark something as not helpful. That goes to our internal team.

We’ll take a look at it. We’ve got some different mechanisms to either warn the user or ban the user, depending on the severity of what the report is.

We also take a look at a lot of other different things that allow us to suss out users who aren’t using the system within our guidelines.

And there’s a lot of folks who have set up entire shops that are just bombarding HARO opportunities, and we’re able to suss those out pretty efficiently now.

You said 21% were just fully AI-generated. I don’t think I’ve ever developed a fully generated AI pitch.

You’re not that [laughter] — you’re not that lazy.

Just — I mean, I use Claude a lot. I use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, all of them. But I just — maybe it’s growing up in the pre-AI era, you know. I remember when blogs weren’t even a thing.

But not even handwriting — just coming up with the angle on your own and not just plugging into a machine. You’re outsourcing your brainpower at that point.

We see that some of the best PR agencies in the world do it.

And so it’s not just — it’s not restricted to people that don’t know any better or who are lazy. Some of the best brands in the world will still get flagged, and it is what it is.

How do you manage that if it’s, let’s just say, one of the top PR agencies in the world that’s doing it? Are you actually going to ban that agency or that brand, and then they’re like, “Well, that’s a pretty powerful brand if it’s one of the Fortune 500-type things”?

I don’t think it matters. It doesn’t matter what the brand is or who the user is. It’s more so a signal.

It would be very irresponsible of us to say, “Oh, 100% AI, you’re banned.”

There’s no permanent bans in that situation. More so, it’s just a report for our team to take a look at because usually it’s one signal of many that allows us to take either a warning action, a ban action, or just ignore it.

Got it. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

You’ve said PR used to mean the front page of the newspaper, getting on the front page of The New York Times. We could talk about vanity placements. We’ve talked about that with past guests. Or page one of Google, since you’re an SEO guy too. But now with AI visibility and whatnot, how do you actually determine when a placement’s moving the needle versus it’s a vanity placement? How do you think about that?

Well, I think the way that PR professionals are defining it today is: Does the brand appear in an AI answer summary, and is AI recommending the brand when customers are prompting it with relevant product- and service-related queries?

So I think that is — the brand being mentioned in the summary or the brand being cited in the summary — is kind of the new way to measure whether or not something’s working.

And I think that you’re seeing all types of innovation in the space to figure out what, in fact, is a valuable outlet that’s worth pursuing.

I’m hearing stuff like, “All right, let’s go prioritize the mom-and-pop blog in Spain overnight because that one blog is super optimized for AI citations and machine relations,” and all this stuff that’s floating around.

And you’re seeing just a transformation of how PR professionals are approaching what PR is today.

And I think that AI summaries is a huge component of it.

Yeah. The whole AEO/GEO thing — we’ve had a lot of it’s been a topic. I’ll put it that way. It’s been a topic whether you’re the topic. It is the topic in 2026.

[laughter]

It really is.

And I think a lot of people just kind of — I don’t want to say overestimate, but they don’t think about it end to end.

I had a conversation with someone where it was like they’re not thinking about what they want to measure before they put the content out and then measure it and then use that to influence the next thing.

So they’re not thinking about the prompt that they actually want the piece of content to influence, or similar prompts.

So it might be that they’re just creating — they’re like, “We have a piece of news. Let’s write it like a generative engine format.”

And it’s like, okay, but is that actually going to move the needle for you?

You know, it’s a new industry, so people are still figuring it out.

But I do think that there is just a sense that this is the silver bullet for PR measurement, and that’s not necessarily true.

Yeah. And I think that it just fits within the framework of what PR is.

You go to the RPI framework and your research, planning, implementation, and the evaluation. This tactic and this strategy has a place in all of them.

You have to research which sites are ultimately going to get cited. You’ve got to incorporate that into your overall strategy. You’ve got to implement content that’s going to be within that AI summary, and you’ve got to evaluate whether or not it actually works or not and what the end result is.

So I think that there’s a lot to be developed within the industry.

Right now, it’s just a time of experimentation and fun, and let’s throw some budget at it and see what works.

And I think that you’re going to see some really good insights surface.

And for PR professionals who are listening, it’s basically like: try it with your own brand, try it with different clients that trust you to do some stuff, and listen to what PR people are talking about on LinkedIn about what is working and try that out as well.

Are you doing anything with GEO, AEO, whatever you want to call it, within Featured and the platform?

Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of brands connected to Featured, but no. Yeah, we have a GEO audit tool within Featured that, from what we’ve heard from users, is pretty fancy and cool.

You can basically just say, “Here’s my website. Here’s a prompt that I want to rank for. Now go do an audit across Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini and see if our brand’s being mentioned.”

And if it is or isn’t, there’s going to be some action items that Featured recommends to say, “Hey, if you do want visibility for this, you need to reach out to this editor at this publication with this direct pitch,” and try to take some action on that.

So I think it’s a great way to — in this space that is kind of cloudy and being developed — you’ve got to have just a clear action item, and that’s what the tool aims to do.

And I assume that pitch you want a human to edit before sending?

Yeah. [laughter] You have to look at it.

Okay. It doesn’t just automatically send.

You can’t automate it all.

Got it.

You guys just launched an MCP server too for select platforms. Talk us through what that actually entails and the thought process behind bringing that to Claude and Cursor and others, and why not some other platforms?

Yeah. So MCP server is just a fancy term for integrated with Claude and Cursor and your favorite AI tool.

And the realization is that today’s business day for a PR professional doesn’t start where it used to. It starts on Claude, and you should be able to do all of your work within Claude.

So why try to get people to go to Featured.com when they already have their work set up and don’t disrupt that? Just bring it into their workspace.

And so that’s essentially what it does.

It allows you to find journalist requests, for example. So rather than going to HARO and going to your inbox and checking that and going to three other different journalist request platforms, just ask Claude to look at Featured.

Say, “Hey, go find me journalist requests.”

And if you’re integrated with Featured, it’s going to group in everything that it’s found across all the different platforms and put that into one workspace.

That’s interesting. I mean, it’s always so fascinating that we’re migrating from, I would say, you went from Windows back in the day to Google Chromebooks and the cloud-based platforms to now basically an AI-based platform that is the work we’re doing.

Even though having this conversation with someone else the other day, I use Claude Cowork, and I don’t think I found a good use case for it [laughter], as wild as that sounds.

But yet we’re increasingly doing work in Claude, ChatGPT, etc.

I think that’s a really good callback where, you know, to put it in perspective, when the browser came out, probably the replacement on that is you used to have to download something to your computer.

And then it’s like, all of a sudden, now you don’t have to download it. Now you could just go to a web browser and type in www and get what you need.

That’s kind of the transformation that we’re living through.

You don’t have to go to www. You now have it all in your favorite AI tool.

Yeah, I agree.

For Featured, there’s a workflow feature that comes with the paid plan, but obviously there’s access across the board for the free plans. What’s the benefit of the workflow and all those pieces?

Are you effectively building a platform that’s competing with the likes of HoneyJar and other PR platforms that seem to be coming out nowadays?

Yeah, definitely.

I mean, Featured, your co-pilot for PR, and workflows is the most powerful component of what Featured is.

And I say this because workflows are your always-on assistant that can be applied to your standard job to be done in PR: monitoring journalist requests, looking and finding podcasts, doing the daily monitoring-type activities that require hours that you would typically miss 75% of the time.

So if I’m looking at what a PR agency does today, they’re typically deploying a single person on monitoring journalist requests, and they’re spending five hours of their entire day looking at journalist requests and figuring out if it’s something worth acting on.

What do they do the other 19 hours of the day?

They just miss.

So, like, an always-on automation allows you to filter all of that stuff.

Now free up the time that you used to spend five hours monitoring, and now you could spend that time actually strategizing and acting and building the relationship with the journalist.

It’s a perfect world for where PR needs to operate.

Yeah. No, I think that makes a lot of sense.

As part of that, is there an automation to ping teammates about getting extra inputs — for example, to respond to a pitch or an inbound request or something like that?

It integrates with Slack. It integrates with email. We’ve got an Asana integration that’s going to be coming out.

So, yeah, it’s bringing the work into workflows in the most easy way possible.

Wow, that’s pretty impressive.

Because I feel like PR tech — everyone talks about ad tech, martech, but PR tech has been lacking for several years now.

It’s always been fractured into — to the point you made earlier about a fractured industry — it’s always been, you know, “Oh, it’s here in Cision, it’s here in Muck Rack, it’s here in Teams and SharePoint and Google Drive,” but it’s not been in one place where you can go and be like, “That’s where we’re going to do all of our work.”

Yeah. That’s why we’re here.

I mean, look, I was sitting here looking at, oh, there’s an AI for finance and Javier, there’s an AI for legal and Harvey.

Where’s the AI for PR?

And you looked at some of the different companies, all of them are still in beta. You have to request access.

We’re like, you know what? Let’s go for it. Let’s be the AI for PR platform.

How many clients do you guys have? Who’s testing it? Who’s using it? Would love to hear success stories.

Yeah. So, Connectively just surpassed 100,000 users.

And HARO has a lot more subscribers than that.

We’re connecting a journalist or publisher with the source via HARO or Connectively, I think, every — was it every 21 seconds? Something like that.

That’s wow.

Yeah. So it’s like, with all the three different brands, it is one of the ways that PR is being — so that’s exciting.

And I think that we’re just getting started with it because, like I said, PR isn’t one thing in 2026.

It is like 26-plus different things, and we’ve got coverage in some of those different areas, but there’s a lot more that needs to be built.

In past conversations, you’ve actually made the case for crisis comms and investor relations to be the next MCP, but those are pretty high-stakes areas. I don’t know a lot of people who are willing to outsource or bring or integrate AI or MCPs or the different technologies into crisis comms, for example. I know Adam Pratt from IBM, who was on the podcast recently, actually talked about how he uses it. What are you hearing that makes you believe that crisis and investor relations are the next frontiers in this area?

I think it’s part of it.

You just have to look at what PR does, and obviously those two areas are definitely a part of it.

Where I’ve seen every successful applied AI company do what they have done is they need to identify the jobs to be done.

Once those jobs are identified, they bring in the experts — the people who are the ultimate experts in crisis communications — and they do evals of outputs, are able to take those insights and take those frameworks and essentially have a level up or two or three levels up from what the baseline is that’s readily available in models.

I think that’s the special part of the tech: you’re able to combine the tech with AI and the experts and apply that on a single job to be done.

And whether that’s investor relations, crisis comms, we’re nowhere near it today. I don’t think that there is anything that is close to it at this point.

That’s definitely where we’re going.

And the blueprint is that you’ve got to be able to take these models that are readily improving, you’ve got to be able to bring in the experts, and then you’re ultimately able to craft a tool that’s usable for PR pros.

Got it.

Yeah. I have a feeling that we’re not around the corner from a crisis comms or investor relations piece.

Maybe a little more investor relations, depending on how you control the data and control the flow of materials, but crisis is just such a nuanced, heavy area that I have a feeling that you’re right on that one.

Brett, where can people reach you? Where can they see and hear more about Featured and the work you’re doing there? Where can they stay in touch?

Yeah. There’s three different brands: Featured.com, HARO at Help a Reporter Out, and Connectively at Connectively.us.

And I’m on LinkedIn if you want to connect.

And the thing that I’ll call out: I try to do 20 customer interviews every single week. This week I did 40 and almost died. [laughter]

But I’m always open to feedback. So if anyone wants to connect, I’m happy to do so.

Great. Brett, thanks for joining the pod.

Thanks, everyone, for listening. We’ll catch you again next time.