By Ryan Richardson · Published 8 October 2026
The overlap failure has a specific signature: a rung with zero sales and a plausible excuse no evidence can kill, or a rung that technically sells at a trickle, propped up by one enthusiastic early buyer kept around as proof that it works.
One documented case: a $27 product produced a plan for the buyer. A $97 product, once the builder was honest about it, also produced a plan. The $97 rung sold to nobody. The price wasn't wrong. The job was duplicated.
The fix wasn't to drop the $97 price or run more traffic at it. It was to reposition the upper rung as a different job entirely, a prove-it layer rather than a second planning layer. The ladder became four distinct jobs: understand it, plan it, see a working version, get it built properly. No overlap, and the rung started selling.
Run the one-sentence test on every adjacent pair of rungs: if the sentence describing what moves someone up a rung is about content rather than effort removed, redesign the rung rather than the price.
Re-run the overlap check whenever a bonus gets added to any rung, because a bonus is a rung nobody priced. A bonus that duplicates the job of the rung above it creates the exact same failure signature, just without a price tag making it visible.
Every pair of adjacent rungs has a distinct buyer-facing job, stated in one sentence each, with no sentence swappable between rungs. Any rung sitting at zero sales for more than a month gets checked for overlap with its neighbours before its price gets touched.
| Claim | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Lower rung in the documented overlap failure | $27 product | Measured in Real Money, Field Manual |
| Upper rung that sold to nobody before repositioning | $97 product | Measured in Real Money, Field Manual |
| Matrix coverage rating for this step | Often skipped | The Sixty Steps matrix |