This best-selling author left Wall Street to build a startup in a tiny Hong Kong apartment

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Before becoming a best-selling author and a marketing expert, Ryan Levesque, who wrote the book Ask, had to deal with the misery of working away from his wife and leave a well-paying job behind to start his own business.

After studying East Asian studies in college, he found himself working in Shanghai for a Wall Street company while his wife was studying in Hong Kong. In 2008, during the global financial crisis, Levesque decided to quit his job, move to Hong Kong to be with his wife, and launch his first business, which was selling ebooks on how to make Scrabble jewelry. He turned that small business into something that was making US$10,000 a month.

From those humble beginnings, he developed what he calls the Ask Method, which has grown into a multimillion-dollar business, where he teaches business owners actionable strategies for asking their customers exactly what they want before trying to sell them anything.

Here’s the interview.

Who is Ryan Levesque? 

I’m probably best known for writing a book called Ask, which has sold over 100,000 copies. It was actually just recently published in Chinese.

The first part of the book tells a little bit about my story and how I discovered something that we now call the Ask Method, a marketing method to better understand your audience. The second half gets into the step-by-step of the process.

I first started in this industry about 10 years ago in Hong Kong, where I launched my first business, before moving back to the United States.

How did life lead you to entrepreneurship?

In college, I studied neuroscience and East Asian studies. At Brown University, when you study East Asian studies, there are three tracks. There is the China track, Japan track, and Korea track, each of which comes with learning the language. I took the China track.

Originally, I was really interested in studying the Chinese language and culture to study traditional Chinese medicine because I was really fascinated by its impact on the brain, with things like acupuncture and herbal medicines. I started down this path. Then, along the way, I became really fascinated with China and just got kind of obsessed with this idea of living in China, living in the Wild West, and really going into business.

After graduating, I worked in Wall Street in New York City and was eventually offered a job by AIG, the insurance company, to run their expansion across China. So, I left New York and moved to Shanghai. My job was basically opening up insurance sales offices around China, and I was managing a small local team. I was just traveling from city to city.

In 2008, I was just exhausted. I had reached this point where I told myself “I don’t want to be living in an airplane, living out of hotels, tethered to my Blackberry, flying from city to city anymore. I want to go into business for myself.”

At the time, my wife—we got married right before we moved to China together, and she’s also American—finished her graduate degree in New York City and decided to pursue a PhD at Hong Kong University (she studied history). For three years, we lived this crazy bi-country marriage, where I was in Shanghai and she was in Hong Kong. We would visit each other every couple of weeks, and this was back in 2006 to 2008.

Was your family supportive of you taking that leap of faith?

What is the Ask Method exactly?

How should you craft the right questions?