It's all very well starting with a word with 3 vowels, but there are only 5 vowels to eliminate. I prefer to start with a word with more consonants than vowels for this reason.
Unless something obvious jumps out at me I start with TRAIN followed by DEMOB. This checks the 4 most common vowels and several 'popular' consonants, without repetition.
Those two words usually give me some sort of guidance to what letters are definitely 'in', and a list of letters which are definitely 'out'.
So far over 28 days I have scores of:
2 tries: 1
3 tries: 11
4 tries: 10
5 tries: 2
6 tries: 4
No failures though.