David decided: Framed Granular's paid plans as removing ads from your profile, not as a feature list

David shipped Granular Pro ($20) and Max ($49) around one positioning thesis: the paid tiers exist to remove the Featured rail from your own profile and to place you in that rail on every other free Granular profile. Max gets the placement 5x as often as Pro. Both unlock the downloadable Granular verified AI skills certificate.

He designed the Free-owner upgrade CTA as a deliberate panacea: the most prominent element of the section, intended to relieve the irritation produced by the rail itself. The mechanic was the conversion lever, not a feature list.

Across several rounds, he rejected drafts that drifted toward familiar shapes:

• "Featured verified profiles similar to David" got cut for sounding like LinkedIn's "People you may know" — language that trains the eye to skip. Replaced with "Exceptional Granular-verified profiles", no name reference.
• The first pricing lede tried to do seven jobs in five sentences. David called it a word salad. Cut to two sentences: "Your profile is currently advertising someone else. Pro and Max take them off yours and put you on theirs."
• "1x featured placement rate" was diagnosed as anchoring Pro as "the basic one". Rewritten so only Max introduces the multiplier as its differentiator.
• "Pick a plan to publish your profile" was rejected outright. The profile is free at signup; what people pay for is the certificate and the placement. The lede had been mis-selling the product.

Visual hierarchy got the same treatment:

• The conversion-lever sentence was originally rendered as 14px gray subtitle text under a 60px serif headline. David: "the best part is in small text". Both sentences now sit at heading weight, italic on the second to carry the turn.
• The hero was capped at 720px while the card grid extended to 1100px. David caught that the hero looked centered-left while the cards looked centered-page, and required they share edges.
• The Free card had been the visually attractive one with a warm cream background. David: "you've made the free plan so beautifully styled in a different color that I might as well fall in love with not paying." Pro and Max now carry the warm tint; Free is the cold default.

The consistent move is that he treats marketing copy and visual hierarchy like production code: names the specific failure mode, demands the mechanism be fixed rather than the surface, and refuses "improvements" that are still in the wrong category.