Featured runs a public relations co-pilot that subject matter experts and PR teams use to find media opportunities. Users tell its agents what they know, and the system surfaces matches across journalist requests, podcasts, awards and GEO — no PR background required. The company's agents deliver more than 100,000 media pitches per month and have sent over 100 million Help A Reporter Out (HARO) emails in the past year. A user is connected with a journalist or publisher every six seconds.

Founder Brett Farmiloe came to the problem from ten years running Markitors, a digital marketing agency with 500 small business clients. Every client had expertise worth sharing but no route to journalists. PR, he says, "has always been about who has access to what." Featured was built to shift the question from who has access to who has knowledge.

All of it runs on an engineering team of three, supporting three brands. That constraint shapes the architecture: infrastructure work is time taken away from features that help customers land placements.

What the pre-Vercel stack cost

Hosting lived on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AI features depended on custom provider integrations, and long-running multi-step jobs ran on separate orchestration infrastructure. Each layer functioned, but each added operational overhead the team could not absorb.

The migration had a forcing function. Featured needed to launch 374 Sanity sites at once, and every Elastic Beanstalk deploy had to be manually spun up, migrated and torn down. Multiplied by almost four hundred, the process was unworkable even spread across three people; Vercel reduced each launch to a single click. The team then evaluated the platform for background jobs and AI tooling, and eventually moved the entire app and its agents.

  • Sanity sites: 374, migrated from AWS Elastic Beanstalk to Vercel
  • Deploys: single-click rollouts across all three brands from one platform, rather than one cluster at a time
  • Model traffic: 17 models routed through AI SDK and AI Gateway
  • Long-running jobs: Workflow SDK replaced custom orchestration

"In hindsight, doing each one of those by hand was kind of crazy," Farmiloe says.

One abstraction for model traffic

AI SDK and AI Gateway carry all of Featured's model traffic, so the team does not maintain custom rate-limit handling or per-provider API integrations. Featured routes across 17 models at any given time. Calling a model is a single standardized function with a schema; changing providers is a configuration change rather than a rewrite, and a newly released model can be tested against Featured's use cases immediately.

Long-running jobs leave custom orchestration

After the AI stack moved, Featured took its long-running jobs off separate orchestration infrastructure and onto Workflow SDK. Those are the processes that cannot live inside a request cycle: monitoring media around the clock, qualifying opportunities and combining the signals that produce the monthly pitch volume.

Chat as the primary interface

Users kept choosing conversation over navigation, so the team made chat the product's main interface and rebuilt it on eve, Vercel's open-source agent framework. The useEveAgent hook supplied durable sessions, streaming, tool calls and approval prompts without hand-wiring an agent. Model calls route through AI Gateway so the team can choose a model per task without managing provider keys. What would have been a months-long rebuild turned into a week-long replace and refactor. Today users ask Featured questions instead of working a dashboard of dozens of buttons, and the team adapts the product to their needs rather than the reverse.

Where the team is headed

Featured is building toward being the AI layer for public relations, along the lines of dedicated agent platforms in legal and finance, with the goal of making it faster and easier for anyone with expertise to get featured.

Its advice to founders building in the agentic era:

  • Your data is your moat. Access to good information is what lets Featured connect people with the sources that want to publish them.
  • Lean on tested abstractions instead of reinventing security and infrastructure by hand.

About Featured: Featured is a co-pilot for public relations that helps people find media opportunities, submit pitches and get featured in the press. It also owns and operates Help A Reporter Out (HARO) and Connectively, journalist request platforms connecting sources with publishers.

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