# Inngest Profiles Featured's Orchestration Layer

- Published: 2026-09-15
- Author: [Featured](https://press.featured.com/author/featured.md)
- Topics: [In the news](https://press.featured.com/media-mention.md)
- Based on: [Inngest Profiles Featured's Orchestration Layer](https://www.inngest.com/customers/featured)
- Source: https://press.featured.com/media-mention/inngest-featured-orchestration-layer/
- Publisher: Featured Press Room

*The workflow platform published a customer story on how Featured's HARO and Connectively pipeline ships 2,500 articles a month on durable orchestration the team never has to operate by hand.*

*Online, Sept 14, 2026 · 11 min read*

![Featured Team](https://featured-uploads.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/internal-console-pages/b2bba153-d1c7-41ae-beba-e5419985b538.webp)

### The numbers, per the story

- **2,500** — Articles published a month across three brands.
- **42** — Average expert answers collected per question before a run starts.
- **100M+** — Emails HARO sends a year to more than 60,000 journalists.
- **100,000+** — Members on Connectively, Featured's expert-response platform.
- **2.5M+** — Pitches fielded across HARO and Connectively combined.
- **7** — People running all three brands today, down from an eight-person orchestration team in 2020.

In 2020, keeping Featured's pipeline running took eight people: a content strategist, two community-outreach specialists, a technical SEO manager posting articles by hand, staff writers, and a digital PR manager holding it together. Founder Brett Farmiloe called that group "a team of 8 or so people that were the orchestration layer to make sure things ran reliably." Today, the story reports, that orchestration layer is software, and a team of seven runs HARO, Connectively, and Featured together.

> Inngest helps our trains (workflows) run; without losing sleep or manually shoveling coal into an engine.
>
> — Brett Farmiloe, Founder, Featured

The piece traces how a run moves from an open question to a published article. Rather than a durable timer that sleeps until a deadline, Connectively runs a cron sweep every 15 minutes that re-reads which questions have actually passed their current deadline — so a publisher pushing a deadline back needs no special handling. Once a question closes, one run works through 60 to 150 durable steps, evaluating experts on experience, expertise, authority, and trust, then admitting answers one at a time so a diverse set of perspectives makes it into the article instead of near-duplicates.

### What runs where, per the story

| Layer | System | Job |
| --- | --- | --- |
| State | Postgres (Drizzle, on Supabase) | Holds questions, expert profiles, answers, publisher settings, finished articles |
| Scheduling and flow control | Inngest | Runs all 45 crons, passes events between functions, throttles and rate-limits |
| Execution | Vercel | Runs the pipeline and the model calls that read and write article prose |

> Orchestration decides what happens and when. The database decides what's allowed to happen at all.
>
> — Brett Farmiloe, Founder, Featured

The story also covers two deliberate limits on what the orchestration layer is allowed to own. A Postgres uniqueness constraint, not workflow logic, guarantees an expert is only notified once per published article. And most functions don't retry: a run that can't produce an article the team would stand behind marks itself failed and stops, rather than risk auto-publishing something under a publisher's masthead.

## About Featured

Featured is a PR co-pilot and the company behind HARO and Connectively, two of the best-known names in earned media. HARO sends more than 100 million emails a year to over 125,000 sources; Connectively has passed 100,000 expert members. Together the two platforms have fielded upward of 2.5 million pitches.

<p class="button"><a href="https://www.inngest.com/customers/featured">Read the original</a></p>

## Media contact

Brett Farmiloe  
Featured  
press@featured.com