A few years back, a neighbor of mine posted on Nextdoor that she had started selling her homemade bread online. I already knew her bread — I had tasted it, and it was something special. The kind of thing that deserved a real audience.

But her website told a different story.

The writing wasn't drawing anyone in, and finding your way around the site was more work than it should have been. For someone pouring that much love into a product, it was hard to watch a website get in the way.

I had spent years in market research — with the Gallup organization and several recruitment firms — so I knew what to do. I recruited 20 people to take a close look at the site and tell us honestly what they experienced. Not what we hoped they'd find. What they actually found.

The feedback was specific, clear, and actionable. We identified where the content was falling flat and where the navigation was losing people. From there, the recommendations were simple: bring in a good copywriter and an SEO specialist, because the product itself was never the problem. The bread was wonderful. It just needed a website that could say so.

Once the research was done, the path forward was obvious. She still had some figuring out to do — turns out shipping bread across county lines comes with its own learning curve — but the website? That was solved.

That little project was EpikInsight's first. And it's still the best way we know how to describe what we do: we help good businesses get out of their own way.