Charlie Houpert

So it started with, you know, the book was created in much the same way where I read this book called Running Lean.

And in tandem with the Lean Startup, it comes from this idea that I had at the time, I was writing stuff that I thought was interesting to me, which is great and it's fun.

But readers were maybe engaged, maybe not.

And instead of going to the emails that I was receiving and seeing what are the questions I'm getting, which by the way were, how do I make a great first impression every time?

I feel like if I'm 20 minutes into a conversation, I'm excellent.

People will like me.

But I struggle with those first 20 minutes.

How do I be more confident in that position?

I was just writing about other stuff because that was what interested me at the time.

So going back to that –

I came up with a survey for a bunch of people, and we basically said, if you could, on a scale of 1 to 10, take any area in your charismatic life to a 10, what would it be?

And we collected responses, and there were six that stood out.

So at the time, we had an email list of probably 3,000 or 4,000 people, and we used SurveyMonkey.

Okay, you used SurveyMonkey?

It started with just actually a Gmail email saying, okay, what kind of topics do you want?

And that gave me the list of things to put into SurveyMonkey so that people could radio click.

So we started with just the types of questions I was getting is what—

gave us the stuff to input first.

So we probably had 10 or 12 that they could do, and then an other category.

And of those, six surged to the top.