Most businesses lose their edge the same way: by quietly copying everyone else in their market until nothing distinguishes them anymore. Ryan Levesque, author of the bestselling book Ask and founder of the customer insight platform Bucket, built an eight figure company by doing the opposite. Speaking at a ScoreApp event in London, where Bucket and ScoreApp announced a new partnership, Levesque laid out five unconventional lessons for building a business that holds up under pressure, drawn from a year that included a 70 million dollar acquisition falling apart and a complete rethink of how he built trust with an audience.
Change Your Questions, Change Your Business
Levesque’s first book was built entirely around asking customers and prospects better questions. What he admits he missed was turning that same discipline inward. After the acquisition deal collapsed, he forced himself to ask what he actually wanted rather than what the market expected of him, and the answer reshaped his entire life and business model. He sold his city home, moved his family to the countryside, and now grows the majority of the food his household eats.
He offers three practical prompts that apply directly to campaign planning and lead generation work, not just personal reflection:
- When you are stuck, ask what single step is so small it is impossible to fail at.
- When you feel blocked, ask what invisible rule you are following that is limiting your options.
- When you are conflicted, ask what you need to let go of to step into a better future.
Those questions matter because the businesses that keep asking them tend to notice shifts in their market before their competitors do. That is exactly the instinct behind building a qualified lead generation strategy rather than chasing volume for its own sake. A team that regularly questions its own assumptions tends to spot a stalling campaign months before the numbers force the conversation.
Why the Old Marketing Playbook Is Breaking
Levesque pointed to four forces he believes are making last decade’s digital marketing approach obsolete. Around 65 percent of Google searches no longer produce a click to any website, which has pushed spend toward paid media and driven up acquisition costs. Google’s own research on the messy middle of the buying journey shows the middle of the funnel behaving like the top of the funnel used to, meaning brands need far more ungated content just to stay visible. Platforms are also withholding third party data from each other, making targeting less accurate rather than more, and traffic has quietly gone almost entirely mobile, with the vast majority of time on Facebook and YouTube now happening on a phone screen.
His conclusion was blunt: a website built to be the centerpiece of a marketing strategy is no longer enough on its own. That is precisely why rethinking the traditional marketing funnel has become a live conversation across the industry, and why relying on data a visitor volunteers directly, rather than data scraped or inferred from behavior, has become more valuable as third party tracking keeps breaking down. ScoreApp was built specifically around that shift, using interactive scorecards to collect zero party data instead of guessing at intent from cookies and pixels.
Standing Out by Doing the Opposite
Levesque’s answer to a noisy, AI saturated content landscape was to strip AI out of his own writing entirely. He started a weekly newsletter written personally, by hand, after admitting to his audience that years of company emails carrying his name had actually been written by copywriters. The confession generated more business opportunity in a few months than years of polished, ghostwritten content had produced.
The lesson he draws from it is one worth testing inside any lead generation program: different is better than better, but only is best. A business that looks and sounds like every competitor in its category is asking to be compared on price. One that stakes out a genuinely distinct position, through its voice, its offer, or the way it segments and speaks to its audience, gives people a reason to choose it specifically. This is where building a scorecard with ScoreApp gives a business something sharper than a generic lead form, since the questions themselves can be designed to reflect a specific point of view rather than a one size fits all survey. A business that asks better questions up front also spends less time chasing leads who were never a fit to begin with.
Shining a Light Where Nobody Else Is Looking
Every marketing channel follows a predictable life cycle, according to Levesque. A channel becomes useful for consumers, marketers notice and flood in, and the resulting saturation pushes consumers elsewhere. Email, search, and the major social platforms have all passed through phases of this cycle, and he argues that attention is now shifting toward physical and audio experiences precisely because screens have become so crowded.
Audiobook sales climbing while ebook sales fall across the industry was the data point that convinced him. People want content they can absorb while doing something else entirely, away from a screen. The same logic applies to physical mail, in person events, and printed materials that bring a brand into a customer’s daily environment rather than competing for a few seconds of scrolling attention. The common thread across each of these channels is capturing genuine first person interest instead of generic lead capture, so the follow up can be specific to what someone actually asked for rather than a one size fits all nurture sequence.
Turning Competitors Into Collaborators
Levesque’s clearest example of this lesson is his own business history. A client who joined his mastermind years ago turned out to compete directly with another member, so Levesque offered a refund. Instead of leaving, that client proposed working on a different, non competing business idea inside the group. The arrangement worked so well that the two eventually became business partners, which set the stage for the Bucket and ScoreApp partnership announced at the same event where Levesque spoke.
His broader point is that markets consolidate over time, almost without exception. A fragmented market filled with small, similar competitors eventually narrows toward a handful of larger, better positioned players. Businesses that spend their energy trying to outlast every rival often miss the better option sitting in front of them: finding the one or two competitors whose strengths complement their own and building something neither could build alone. Consolidation tends to reward whoever has clarity on their own customer base first, which again comes back to collecting information a prospect actually wants to share rather than information pulled from third party trackers.
Trust Is Built on Heart, Humor and Humanity
The most personal lesson Levesque shared involved a low point on his farm, where he broke down while working with his cattle until one of the herd approached him, nudging and rubbing against him until he started laughing instead of crying. He wrote about the moment publicly afterward, arguing that audiences trust people who show all three of those qualities rather than a polished, permanently confident version of themselves.
Levesque frames know, like, and trust as the real currency behind every sale, ahead of any single currency a business gets paid in. A scorecard or quiz that reflects genuine understanding of a person’s situation, rather than a generic set of questions reused across every campaign, builds exactly that kind of trust before a sales conversation ever starts. He closed with a final habit worth adopting directly: finding a mentor whose work resonates and becoming that person’s most dedicated student, since the fastest path to improvement rarely comes from guessing alone.
Putting the Lessons to Work
None of these lessons require a bigger budget. They require a willingness to ask harder questions of a business before asking them of the market, to pick channels nobody else is using well, and to treat every lead as a specific person rather than a generic contact record. A business that wants to put this into practice can start small: build a single scorecard, write one honest piece of content without outside help, or have one direct conversation with a competitor about where interests actually overlap.
The common thread across all five lessons is that clarity beats volume every time. A business that understands exactly who it serves, and asks that audience sharper questions than its competitors do, ends up spending less on advertising while converting more of the leads it actually wants. That is the entire premise behind replacing a generic contact form with a diagnostic journey: inputs lead to interpretation, interpretation leads to a personalised result, and a personalised result gives a prospect a reason to keep talking.
For a business ready to apply zero party data and genuine segmentation rather than generic forms, the fastest starting point is to build a scorecard that reflects a specific point of view and put it in front of the right audience.
