Price your digital products as a value ladder with two or three rungs, sorted by how much of your personal time each offer includes: done-by-you (courses, templates) at the lowest price, done-with-you (cohorts, group coaching) in the middle, done-for-you (1:1 work, implementation) at the top. Each rung raises the odds a customer buys the next one, so a few connected offers outperform a big menu of disconnected ones. Among experts on Kajabi who have made at least one sale, the typical single-offer expert has earned $180 all-time, while the typical expert carrying ten or more offers has earned $82,212. Build the rungs in sequence, and set the top one high enough to anchor everything under it.
That's the summary. Here's the argument, with receipts.
We've watched experts earn more than $11.7 billion on Kajabi since 2010, and the pricing question we hear most ("what should I charge for this?") skips the question that matters more: what should this offer sit next to? A price on its own floats in space. A price on a ladder has a job.
What do done-by-you, done-with-you, and done-for-you actually mean?
Three delivery levels. The only variable that changes is how much of your week the customer gets.
Done-by-you. The customer works through your material on their own. Courses, templates, workbooks, a self-serve curriculum. Cheapest rung, and the only one that scales to a thousand buyers without your calendar noticing.
Done-with-you. You're alongside them. Cohorts, group coaching, workshops, a paid community where you actually show up. Mid-priced, because your time is in the room but shared across the group.
Done-for-you. The customer buys the finished result, produced by you or someone you've trained. One-on-one engagements, implementation work, consulting retainers. Top rung, top price.
All three rungs sell the same expertise. The price spread comes from scarcity: there's exactly one of you, and offers containing more of you cost more. Simple physics.
(If you're still choosing what to sell at all, start with the five business models for selling your expertise, then come back.)
Why does a ladder beat a menu of offers?
Because a price only means something next to another price. (I've been giving this speech at dinner tables for a decade. My family lets me.)
Ask a stranger to pay $1,800 for your cohort and they'll weigh it against the alternative they know: the free stuff on YouTube. Rough comparison, and you'll lose it most days. Ask the customer who already paid $149 for your course, finished it, and got a result, and $1,800 looks like the logical continuation of a journey they're already on. The bottom rung earns trust and sets the anchor. The top rung makes the bottom one feel like pocket change. The rungs do each other's selling.
A pile of unrelated offers at random prices does none of that work. Nothing anchors anything, every sale starts from zero, and your audience can't tell what you actually do. A gift shop carries thirty items with no relationship between any of them. An expert business has a sequence a customer can walk.
The height of the ladder matters too, and the numbers here are blunt. Among experts on Kajabi who have made at least one sale, those whose most expensive offer stays under $50 have typically earned $178 all-time, and 2.6% of them ever reach $100K. Experts with at least one offer priced $2,500 or higher have typically earned $174,730, and 62.4% of them reach $100K. ("Typically" means the middle of the pack: line each group up poorest to richest, and that's what the person standing in the dead center has earned.) Those are the two ends; the full staircase, every band in between is published in our pricing report.
Now the caveat, in plain sight, because the caveat is the credibility: that's correlation. Repricing your offer at $2,500 tomorrow guarantees nothing. Experts grow into premium offers as they succeed, and premium offers help experts succeed, and we can't cleanly separate those two directions... and neither can anyone else publishing pricing advice, whatever their charts imply. What the data does support: six-figure expert businesses built entirely on sub-$50 products are close to nonexistent. The high rung is where the money concentrates, and you want one on your ladder eventually.
(For the specific "what number goes on the course" question, we did that math in the course pricing math nobody shows you.)
How many rungs do you need?
Two, with a third when the business asks for it.
"But the big earners all have deep catalogs. You just said so."
We did, and the number is dramatic: experts carrying ten or more offers show a typical lifetime figure of $82,212, and 45% of them cross $100K, against that $180 typical for the single-offer crowd. So should you spend this quarter building ten offers? Please don't. That stat cuts both ways, we can't tell you which direction the causation runs, and neither can anyone else. Big catalogs mostly pile up as a side effect of surviving and succeeding: ship an offer, test it, kill the duds, build what customers request next, repeat for years. Treating "ten offers" as the lever is like noticing wealthy people own multiple houses and concluding that buying four houses will make you wealthy.
Both lessons hold. A single offer caps you hard... $180 typical is a hobby with a checkout page. And the deep catalog that eventually earns real money gets built rung by rung, starting with rung two, which is where everything changes. (The $180 figure is one slice of a bigger picture we published on whether selling online courses is actually profitable.)
The second purchase is where the business starts
Here's the number that reframed how we think about pricing. Of the more than $11.7 billion earned by experts on Kajabi since 2010, 53.8% came from repeat buyers. Over half, from customers coming back for a second or third purchase from an expert they already trusted.
Split the population and the pattern gets louder. Among experts with at least one sale, the typical six-figure expert has sold to 563 distinct buyers who average 2.67 purchases each. The typical expert below six figures has sold to 10 buyers averaging 1.22 purchases. Two different species of business. One compounds, because each new customer lowers the cost of the next sale. The other restarts at zero after every sale, forever.
The economics explain why. Winning a customer the first time costs the most you will ever pay for revenue: months of content, ad spend, referral favors, all spent convincing someone with no reason to trust you yet. Sale number two rides on trust you already paid for. And the timing is predictable: a customer who finishes your course, or wraps a coaching engagement with you, lands somewhere new, and the view from there includes the next problem. An expert with a second rung has already built the thing that solves it. An expert with one offer has nothing left to sell, so the customer carries their next problem, and their trust, to somebody else.
The ladder is the machine that catches the second purchase. That's its actual job. The anchoring is a bonus.
Which rung should you build first?
Two directions work. Choose yours deliberately instead of drifting into one:
Premium first, then package down. You already sell high-touch work: consulting, 1:1 coaching, done-for-you projects. Your second rung is the done-by-you version of the material you find yourself repeating with every single client. Package it once. Buyers who could never afford your calendar can afford your curriculum, your day rate makes its price look like a rounding error, and a slice of those buyers eventually upgrade to your calendar.
Scalable first, then climb. You sell a course or a membership. Watch your most engaged customers, because sooner or later some of them will try to buy a bigger slice of your attention. (This request shows up so reliably we'd call it a law.) The done-with-you rung above answers them, and your low rung keeps feeding it buyers who already speak your framework.
Both directions end at the same ladder. The failure mode is standing on one rung for years, waiting.
How far apart should the rungs be priced?
Close enough to climb, far enough to anchor.
A $29 template pack sitting under a $15,000 retainer leaves a canyon no customer will jump. Either build a middle rung or pull the prices toward each other. And keep the rungs distinct in what they deliver: curriculum on one rung, access on another, outcomes at the top. If your new course teaches what your membership already teaches, your members will notice, pick the cheaper option, and quietly leave.
One more shape worth designing toward: at least 42% of what experts have earned that we can categorize by pricing type arrives as recurring payments rather than one-time sales. Recurring pricing puts the repeat purchase on autopilot... every renewal is a customer deciding, again, that you're worth paying. A rung that can truthfully live as a subscription is the most durable thing on the ladder. (Memberships have their own math, including a retention problem you should see before you build one: the membership math and the 3-payment problem.)
When are you ready to add rung two?
Ready looks like this:
Unready looks like this: you're bored (a feeling, and feelings ship terrible offers)... you're copying a competitor's launch (their ladder matches their strengths, and you have no idea what it costs them to run)... or you're expecting a new offer to rescue one that's struggling (a struggling offer plus a new offer equals two struggling offers).
And the biggest one, the mistake we've watched kill more expert businesses than bad marketing ever has: attempting every rung simultaneously. A course, a community, and a coaching program all in flight, each "launching soon," and six exhausted months later nothing is finished and nothing earns. The rungs run on different fuel... a course is a creation sprint, a community is hospitality that never closes, coaching is sustained attention on one person's situation, delivery work is execution. A single finished rung produces revenue. Four rungs at 70% produce a to-do list.
Design your ladder this week
Grab a piece of paper. Five decisions:
One piece of logistics before you build anything: courses, coaching, and memberships all run on a single Kajabi plan, so rung two costs you the work of designing the offer, and the software bill stays where it is.
Two or three rungs, connected, each one anchoring the next. That's the whole pricing strategy, and it beats every ten-offer menu we've ever seen.
