Narrator: Imagine a company selling high-end, $2,000 water ionizers. They’re struggling. Their marketing is built around the health benefits of alkaline water, a message they believe is compelling. Yet, sales are flat. In a last-ditch effort, they decide to survey their audience, not by asking what they want, but by asking about their single biggest health challenge. The responses are shocking. The primary motivation for their customers isn't the desire for alkaline water; it's a deep-seated fear of the contaminants lurking in their tap water. Armed with this single insight, the company overhauls its messaging. The result? They generate $750,000 in sales in just five days.

This is the central puzzle that Ryan Levesque’s book, Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy, sets out to solve. It argues that most businesses fail not because their product is poor, but because they operate on flawed assumptions about what their customers truly desire. The book provides a systematic formula to stop guessing and start asking the right questions in the right way, uncovering the hidden motivations that drive purchasing decisions.

Narrator: The foundational premise of the Ask Formula is a counterintuitive one: directly asking customers what they want is often the worst way to find out. Levesque points to a classic business legend, often attributed to Henry Ford, who supposedly said, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." People can only articulate their desires within the frame of their current reality. They can’t imagine a solution they’ve never seen.

This isn't just a problem for industrial-age innovators; it plays out in everyday life. Levesque uses the simple "dinner dilemma" to illustrate this. When a group of friends tries to decide where to eat, the question "What do you want for dinner?" is often met with a chorus of "I don't know, what do you want?" People struggle to articulate a specific desire from an infinite field of options. However, they are remarkably good at identifying what they don't want or what they've experienced in the past. If the question changes to "Are you in the mood for Italian?" or "How about that Thai place we went to last month?" the conversation moves forward. The Ask Formula is built on this psychological principle: instead of asking people to invent a solution, it guides them to reveal their problems, challenges, and preferences through a carefully structured process.

Narrator: The first step in the Ask Formula is the Deep Dive Survey. Its purpose is not to generate product ideas, but to understand the market’s language, pain points, and existing segments. This is an open-ended survey that asks one single, powerful question: "What's your #1 single biggest challenge when it comes to [your market]?" The goal is to get raw, unfiltered responses that reveal how customers think and talk about their problems.

The case of Live Energized, the water ionizer company, is a perfect example of the Deep Dive in action. The company assumed its customers were motivated by the positive health benefits of alkaline water. However, their Deep Dive Survey revealed that the dominant emotional driver was fear. Customers were terrified of contaminants, chemicals, and fluoride in their municipal tap water. They weren't running towards a health benefit; they were running away from a perceived danger. This insight was a goldmine. Live Energized completely changed its marketing to address this fear head-on, leading to an explosive $750,000 sales launch. They succeeded because they stopped selling what they thought customers wanted and started addressing the problem customers were actually trying to solve.

Narrator: Once the Deep Dive Survey reveals the different challenges within a market, the next step is to group those challenges into "buckets." This is the core of segmentation. The goal is to identify the top 3-5 distinct segments of the audience and then create a "Micro-Commitment Bucket Survey" to sort new prospects into the right bucket automatically. This survey uses simple, multiple-choice questions to guide a person down a specific path.

Levesque’s own first business, selling guides on how to make Scrabble tile jewelry, illustrates this perfectly. Initially, he and his wife sold a single, generic guide with mediocre results. But through customer questions, they realized they weren't serving one market, but at least three distinct ones: crafters using origami paper, crafters using personal photos, and crafters using glass-mosaic tiles. Each group faced unique challenges. By creating three separate, specialized guides—one for each "bucket"—and offering them to customers based on their specific needs, their income jumped from $500 a month to over $10,000 a month. They weren't just selling a product anymore; they were providing a tailored solution, which allowed them to dominate the niche and charge a premium price.

Narrator: With the market segmented into buckets, the Ask Formula constructs a "Survey Funnel" to guide each prospect to a personalized sales experience. After a visitor completes the short, multiple-choice Micro-Commitment Bucket Survey, they aren't sent to a generic, one-size-fits-all sales page. Instead, they land on a "Post-Survey Sales Prescription" page. This page features a video and offer that is customized specifically for their bucket.

Levesque uses the analogy of visiting a doctor. A good doctor doesn't just hand out the same pill to every patient. They ask questions to diagnose the specific problem and then prescribe a tailored solution. The Survey Funnel does the same at scale. It diagnoses the visitor's challenge through the survey and then prescribes the perfect solution on the next page. The tennis instruction company Fuzzy Yellow Balls used this exact strategy to break a frustrating sales plateau. By segmenting their audience based on their biggest tennis struggles and showing each segment a customized video with a relevant offer, they generated over $250,000 in just six months from a previously stagnant product line.

Narrator: The Ask Formula doesn't end once a prospect sees an offer. A huge portion of sales comes from the email follow-up, and Levesque’s process creates a powerful feedback loop, especially for those who don't buy immediately. While buyers get a sequence focused on product consumption and success, non-buyers receive a different kind of communication.

The most powerful tool in this sequence is the "Do You Hate Me?" survey. After a few emails, if someone still hasn't purchased, they receive a simple, direct email with a subject line like "Do I have something wrong?" or even the provocative "Do you hate me?" The body of the email asks one question: "I noticed you didn't buy. Can you just hit 'reply' and let me know why? I'd really appreciate your honest feedback." Levesque found that this disarming, slightly shocking approach generates brutally honest and incredibly valuable responses. It uncovers hidden objections, confusing aspects of the offer, and pricing issues that were invisible before. This feedback is then used to refine the sales message, create better FAQs, and improve the entire funnel for the next wave of customers, turning a potential failure into a source of continuous improvement.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Ask is that businesses must stop projecting their own beliefs onto their customers and instead build a system for listening. The Ask Formula is a powerful methodology for replacing assumptions with data-driven empathy. It provides a structured way to not only discover what customers want to buy, but to understand their fears, their challenges, and the very language they use to describe their world. By doing so, a business can craft marketing that feels less like a sales pitch and more like a helpful, personalized conversation.

The real-world impact of this approach is a fundamental shift in the relationship between a company and its customers. It moves from a one-way broadcast to a two-way dialogue, where the customer feels seen, heard, and understood. The book leaves entrepreneurs and marketers with a profound challenge: Are you willing to ask the questions and truly listen to the answers, even if it means discovering that everything you thought you knew about your business was wrong?