Entrepreneurs are a restless bunch, always looking to try something new and build a better solution. Such is true for Brett Farmiloe, a Scottsdale entrepreneur who recently sold one company and set out to build another.
“It's super refreshing to be back in the saddle with more questions and answers, you know, rebuilding something from day one,” he said.
Farmiloe founded Markitors, a Valley search engine optimization (SEO) company, back in 2012. He sold Markitors last month after nearly a decade in business and he’s since been working on Terkel, a marketplace that helps people find answers to their questions online.
Farmiloe recently completed an eight-week run of pitching investors, bringing in $500,000 in seed funds as of Jan. 21, which he hopes will give the company the juice it needs to grow its user base significantly.
Terkel was founded in late 2020, and Farmiloe said he started getting serious about building the company last February, with seven people working on the company now. Despite its short history, Terkel is already working with GoDaddy, the University of Arizona, Conscious Capitalism Arizona and others to publish content on their sites.
Terkel is one of the 16 companies selected to compete at this year’s Venture Madness pitch contest in Phoenix, the longest running capital contest in the state. Terkel will compete in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) category at the event on March 2-3.
Finding a voice
The journey to Terkel started 16 years ago, when Farmiloe (then a recent UA grad) set off across the country in an RV to try and answer a question that many young people face: What should I do with my life? Farmiloe and a pair of friends drove around the U.S., interviewing people along the way about their career journeys. Farmiloe eventually wrote up the stories he collected in a book called "Pursue the Passion."
Unbeknownst to Farmiloe at the time, that project mirrored the work of Studs Terkel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and oral historian who interviewed hundreds of people about their work. Terkel interviewed farm workers, switchboard operators, welders, salespeople and more, putting their personal stories and expertise on display.
Farmiloe said the idea of celebrating people and their experiences is the throughline between those RV days and starting Terkel.
“The big vision is to democratize thought leadership by giving voice to the uncelebrated,” he said. “If you look at some of the people who are users of Terkel, these are people who don't have the opportunity to share their expertise and experiences.”
Connection to expertise
Terkel is a two-sided online marketplace that helps website publishers connect with people who have relevant expertise to share. For example, a website publisher will pose a question on the Terkel site and users will write up answers to the query. Terkel’s software then uses natural language processing to select the best answer and deliver that content to a publisher, who then chooses what they’d like to do with it.
The platform helps users turn their expertise into online authority by getting published on popular websites; Importantly, these pieces come with the author's byline, so people can build up an online portfolio of work.
There are currently 3,000 users registered on Terkel’s freemium platform (200 of whom pay) and 100 publishing partners, which do not have to pay to receive content from Terkel, at least for the time being.
Farmiloe said the new funding will help reach the goal of reaching 30,000 registered users on the platform by the end of the year and to boost the number of publishing partners up to 2,500.
Though Farmiloe has started several businesses in the past, he said Terkel is different because he’s plugging into the Phoenix startup ecosystem more than he has before, including his upcoming pitch at Venture Madness.
“I'm not looking forward to winning Venture Madness, I'm looking forward to participating in Venture Madness,” he said. “It's a community like, honestly, winning probably would come second to just learning and making all the connections that we can in Arizona. So that might sound really cheesy, but I think if that's the mentality that I'm approaching it with, it's like, learning everything that I can from it.”
