Ask by Ryan Levesque, published by Dunham Books in 2015, is a guide to finding out what customers want to buy by asking them in a structured way, mostly through online surveys. Levesque developed the method selling information products and online courses, and the book turns it into a step-by-step system for online businesses. Hay House Business reissued it in 2019.
What is Ask about?
The central idea is that customers are poor at designing products for you and very good at describing what they struggle with. Levesque’s method starts with an open survey sent to your audience, built around one question about their single biggest challenge in your area. You read every answer, then group people by the patterns you find. Each group gets its own message, offer and follow-up.
The book then moves from research to selling. Levesque shows how to turn the survey results into a short quiz that lets new visitors place themselves into the right group, followed by email sequences and offers matched to each group. He also covers follow-up surveys for people who did not buy, so you learn why and adjust the offer.
Its difference from other validation books is that it lives inside online marketing. Where interview guides work face to face, Ask runs at the scale of an email list, with dozens or hundreds of answers per round. It is written in the confident, energetic voice of the online marketing world.
What are the main lessons for founders?
- Ask one open question. A single question about someone’s biggest challenge in your area gets richer answers than a long multiple-choice survey.
- Read the long answers closely. People who write several sentences are the most engaged and the most likely to buy. Their words show the real problem.
- Find the groups. Answers cluster into a few types of customer with different needs. A single generic offer serves none of them well.
- Borrow customer language. Copy the phrases people use about their problem into your headlines, emails and sales pages.
- Ask those who did not buy. A short survey to non-buyers tells you whether the price, the timing or the offer itself missed.
Who should read Ask?
It suits founders of online businesses with an existing audience: course creators, coaches, newsletter writers, e-commerce shops and software products with an email list. It helps most once you have a few hundred people to survey, and it is useful when sales are stuck and you do not know why.
Skip it if you are pre-audience, selling complex products to companies or working in a regulated field. With no list to survey, the method has nothing to run on.
How do you put Ask to work this week?
- Send your email list or community a one-question survey asking about their biggest challenge in your area.
- Read every answer, highlight the longest ones and sort responses into three or four groups by the problem they describe.
- Rewrite your main landing page headline using the exact phrases from the largest group.
The free Digital Marketing module in the F/MS Startup School shows how to turn those groups into email and ad campaigns.
Where does Ask fall short?
Surveys capture what people say, and the book trusts stated challenges more than observed behaviour. The style is heavy on funnel jargon and marketing hype, and many examples come from small niche information businesses. The book says little about data protection, which matters for any founder collecting answers from people in Europe. It also assumes you already have an audience. For behaviour-based interviews before you have a list, read The Mom Test, and for testing an idea from scratch, Will It Fly?.