"Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Method to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy" by Ryan Levesque is a practical guide on how to use strategic surveys to discover customers' deep desires and structure offers that sell. Levesque developed this method after generating more than $100 million in online sales across 23 different niches, from finance to dog training.
"Your ideas about what your customers want and how they'd like to be sold are just that: ideas. Your ideas can be right or wrong. Only tests will tell. Communicate with customers so they feel you're speaking TO them, not AT them from above." — Ryan Levesque
BOOK SUMMARY
Levesque identifies a critical problem in modern marketing: entrepreneurs assume they know what their customers want, build products based on those assumptions, and then fail when the market doesn't respond. His solution is the Ask Formula, a survey system designed to extract directly from customers what they want to buy and how they want to be sold.
The Survey Funnel method:
1. Deep Dive Survey: An initial survey with open-ended questions sent to prospects to discover their biggest challenges, frustrations, and desires. Key questions include:
2. Analysis of linguistic patterns: Review responses looking for repeated words or phrases. Structure headlines and copy using exactly the language your target market uses, making them feel you're speaking directly to them.
3. Micro-commitment Bucket Survey: A shorter survey that classifies prospects into "buckets" or segments according to their specific situation. Each bucket receives a personalized offer based on their response.
4. The counterintuitive question sequence: Instead of asking "what do you want?", Levesque recommends asking "what don't you want?" and "what have you tried before?". This reveals more about true motivations than direct questions.
5. The power of micro-commitments: Each step of the survey is a small "yes" that prepares the prospect for the final "yes" of purchase. The survey itself is a progressive commitment mechanism.
Levesque has used this method to generate more than 10,000 leads per day, process 2.8 million surveys, and acquire 175,000 customers across 19 different industries.
WHY I RECOMMEND READING THIS BOOK? By Francisco Santolo
This book should be required reading for any entrepreneur before writing a line of code or manufacturing a product. Levesque cures you of the disease of "I think I know what the customer wants" — the main cause of startup failure.
I especially recommend it because it's purely tactical. It's not marketing theory; it's a step-by-step instruction manual. It gives you the exact questions to ask, the tools to use (Google Forms, Typeform), and how to analyze the responses. I teach idea validation through problem interviews, and Levesque's method is the scalable version of that process: instead of 10 individual interviews, you can get insights from hundreds of prospects simultaneously.
The idea of using the customer's exact language in your copy is brilliantly simple but rarely executed. Most entrepreneurs use corporate jargon while their customers use completely different vocabulary. The gap between those two languages is where sales are lost.
If you're in the validation phase of your startup, this book can save you months of work and thousands of dollars. And if you already have a running business, it helps you optimize your messaging and create offers that resonate deeply with what the market actually wants to buy, not with what you think they should want.
RELATED BOOKS
"The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick
The perfect complement to Ask. While Levesque teaches you to survey at scale, Fitzpatrick gives you the conversational skills for individual problem validation interviews.
"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini
To understand the psychology behind micro-commitments and the sequence of "yeses" that Levesque uses in his survey funnels.
"Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely
Ariely explores why people don't always know how to express what they really want, which contextualizes why Levesque's method — which uses indirect questions — works better than traditional surveys.