Two products at two prices doing the same job cannibalise

The symptom

A higher-priced rung on a ladder sells at a trickle or not at all, propped up by one enthusiastic early buyer kept as proof that it works, while a cheaper rung nearby keeps selling fine.

The cause

The overlap failure has a specific signature: a rung with zero or near-zero sales, and a plausible excuse that no amount of evidence can kill on its own, usually some version of 'the traffic isn't warm enough yet.' The real cause sits one level down. A $27 product produced a plan. A $97 product, once honestly assessed, also produced a plan. The price difference was real. The job the two rungs did for the buyer was not. Given a choice between two rungs that do the same job, the market prices them the same, no matter what the price tags say.

The fix

Write one sentence per rung describing the job it does for the buyer, not what it contains. If two rungs' sentences could swap without anyone noticing, there's one rung, not two, however different the price tags look. The $97 rung in this case was repositioned as a prove-it layer instead of a repeat of the planning job: understand it, plan it, see a working version, get it built properly, four distinct jobs with no overlap, and it started selling.

How to spot it

For every pair of adjacent rungs on your own ladder, write the one-sentence job each one does for the buyer. If any two sentences could be swapped without changing the meaning, you have an overlap, not a ladder, whatever the two prices say. Re-run this check whenever a bonus gets added to any rung, since a bonus is a rung nobody priced.