Every engagement opens the same way.

Two weeks of diagnosis, a ranked roadmap, a decision in week three, then a fixed allowance of work sized to what the audit finds. One operator, systems that hand off, and you own everything from day one.

How an engagement works

Four phases · every engagement · same order
Surveyor at work: reconnaissance and 90-day traverse
FIG. 01 · RECONNAISSANCE
1 Weeks 1–2 · decision week 3

Audit: the Funnel & Stack Audit

A fixed-scope diagnosis with no ongoing commitment. Half a week of discovery (intake pack, kickoff, stakeholder interviews), then a week of research, then the deliverable. It's the opening of every engagement, and for some companies it's the whole engagement.

Funnel audit Channels, messaging, conversion points, pipeline sources and the sales process as it actually runs, with numbers, against benchmarks.
Stack audit Every GTM tool, what it costs, what it's doing, where the gaps sit, each tagged keep, cut, add or replace.
90-day roadmap Three to five ranked root causes; every initiative tagged human, AI-assisted or automated.
You get One polished audit document and a strategy call in week three. Yours to run, with or without me.
Book the audit call
2 Week 3

Plan

A separate review call a few days after the strategy call, for your considered reaction, not your first one. We sort the options into now / next / not this term.

You get A 2–3 page Execution Plan you approve before anything is built.
3 Week 4 → term end

Execute

Every deliverable runs brief → build → your three-day review → handoff pack. Experiments run charter → instrument → live window → read-out.

You get A five-line Friday update every week; a strategy call on cadence.
4 Final 2 weeks

Review & renew

What was set out to move and what moved. Every deliverable with its outcome, what the audit ranked that's still undone, and a recommended next term.

You get A term read-out written so you can forward it to your board.

Four ways to continue

After the audit, the roadmap is yours. Pick work off the menu as you need it, or take an ongoing engagement that bundles a fixed allowance of work with a standing cadence. What changes is how much gets built and how close I sit to the team.

No term

À la carte

Run the roadmap yourself; pull me in for the pieces you want built.
The work One deliverable at a time Any item on the menu, for 12 months from your audit.
The full audit and roadmap, weeks 1–2
Menu access at engagement-client pricing for a year
Each item briefed, built and handed off on its own
No cadence, no commitment, just a follow-up note when you decide
3 months Most common

Build

One thing fixed properly, in a quarter.
The work 3 deliverables or 1 Experiment A full site. Or a sales kit and a deck.
Everything in À la carte
Monthly strategy call
Dedicated Slack, same-business-day
Written month-end summary and a Friday update every week
4 months

Scale

A quarter of building, then a quarter of proving it.
The work 6 deliverables or 2 Experiments Site + sales kit + deck. Or an Experiment and the automation behind it.
Everything in Build
Quarterly written business review
Two Experiments run staggered, three weeks apart
Long enough for a result to show up
6 months recommended · 3 minimum

Embedded

I am your GTM function. One client at a time.
The work A standing block of working hours, monthly No deliverable count. Pointed wherever the roadmap says.
Everything in Scale
Weekly strategy call; seat in your leadership cadence
CRM configuration and administration owned outright
Re-planned every week against the roadmap
Experiments

Where the audit supports it, I'll steer you toward an Experiment over a stack of deliverables: a written hypothesis, the list, sequence, page and automation to test it, four to six weeks live, and a read-out that ends in an explicit kill, iterate or scale call. It produces a result, not three assets.

Four things founders say

If one of these is your sentence, the shape of the engagement is already known. The audit confirms it.

Launch Scale

"We just raised or repositioned and our GTM doesn't match what we've become."

What gets built
Site Build
Sales Kit
Sales Deck
Pipeline Scale

"Founder-led sales is maxed out and we have no repeatable source of meetings."

What gets built
One Experiment
RevOps Automation Package
Enablement Build

"We have a marketing team. They're slow and we can't hire more."

What gets built
Enablement Bundle: workshop, playbook, 30 days async
Embedded Embedded

"We're about to post a VP of Marketing req and we're not sure we should."

What gets built
CRM Build in month one
Roadmap execution thereafter

Not sure which fits?

Everyone starts with the same two weeks. In week three you'll have a ranked roadmap, and we'll both know whether à la carte, Build, Scale or Embedded is the right next step.

Book a call

No deck, no pitch.

Surveyor's collage: a claim staked on a floating mesa, cowboy and orange sun, section 24 platted
Self Help Co

Let me Kyle Self help you find a repeatable path to product market fit.

Most early stage companies waste entirely too much time, money, and effort finding, getting in front of, and selling to their ICP. Our specialty is figuring this out as quickly and affordably as possible, help set it up for scale, and hand over the reigns.

{{ ticker }}

The average {{ stageLabel }} company 
spends upwards of {{ stageAmount }} 
preparing their GTM foundation.

Engraved surveyor's compass, its degree ring marked to 154.8°
43%

of failed startups blame product–market fit. The median one raised $11M first.

Source ↗
CB Insights · 431 post-mortems
Pressure gauge with 70% of its 0–200 PSI scale filled
70%

of startups scale before they’re ready. 93% of them never pass $100K a month.

Source ↗
Startup Genome · 3,200+ startups
Surveyor's chain laid in rows, the first 12% marked
12%

of experiments produce a real win. The median company runs 34 a year.

Source ↗
Optimizely · 127,000 experiments
Open pocket watch, 17% of the dial marked against the historical arc
17%

of seed companies reach Series A within 24 months. It used to be 25–30%.

Source ↗
Carta · 3,365 US startups

If one of these is yours, the first step is the same in every case: find out which part of the funnel is actually broken before spending on any of it.

How it works

Roadmap in hand inside 30 days
{{ p.no }} {{ p.weeks }}

{{ p.name }}

{{ p.d }}

You get {{ p.gate }}
Same order, every time

Everyone starts with the audit. What changes afterward is how much gets built and how close I sit to the team: à la carte, Build, Scale or Embedded. How engagements work →

What I build, at fixed scope.

One operator, a department’s output, because research, drafting, design, build and enrichment all run on AI systems I’ve built. Every item has a definition of done, ships with a handoff pack, and lands in your own accounts.

Freight depot, lot 84, manifest
FIG. 02 · MANIFEST · LOT 84

{{ cat.headline }}

{{ cat.d }}

Reach for this when
{{ w }}
Deliverables {{ cat.count }}
{{ it.name }} {{ it.d }}
{{ it.size }}
Not offered

Paid media buying, SDR management, and domain or deliverability management. Systems yes, people no. I build what the SDR works, I don't manage the SDR. I'll introduce you to a specialist for any of them.

Archival crew photograph: the team this replaces
FIG. 03 · THE OLD CREW
Roadmap tagged by leverage

Human / AI-assisted / automated, on every line.

Fixed-scope deliverables

Defined project, defined outcome, defined price.

Systems that hand off

Everything I build runs in your accounts after I'm gone.

Proof

Two go-to-market functions built from nothing, the deliverables they were built out of, and what the founders said afterward.

Case studies · example deliverables
Vitable Health
$100K→$20M
ARR while I ran marketing
Six years as the first marketing hire, seed through Series A. Positioning, site, CRM and outbound built from nothing.
Vitable Health
276
qualified meetings a month
Booked through cold email outreach, paid channels and SEO/AEO content, feeding 15 SDRs and 9 AEs.
Vitable Health
41%
of pipeline from owned work 
$1.46M in new ARR from channels I ran directly, on an ICP narrowed to home care agencies near 50 employees.
Kanga Coolers
$0→$2M+
revenue, bootstrapped
Paid social, search and email running $2K a day at 4:1 ROAS, plus the pitch that closed Mark Cuban on Shark Tank.
Kanga Coolers
$500K+
B2B sales from ABM
Custom coolers sold to Bud Light, High Noon and Natty Light with micro-targeted creative, one brand at a time.

Example deliverables

Everything I’ve built → Work

Who this is for

I work with a narrow band of company on purpose: the shape where one operator plus systems genuinely replaces a function. Here is the spec, plainly.

Stage · motion · shape
Stage 01
Seed to Series A Typically $1M–$6M raised, 12–30 months of runway. Post-seed and pre-Series-A is the sweet spot.
Bootstrapped, past $1M ARR Same shape without the raise: profitable, growing, no marketing function yet.
Too early: pre-product, pre-revenue Nothing to diagnose yet. Come back once something is selling.
Motion 02
Founder-led sales, hitting the ceiling A repeatable customer exists and one person is the entire funnel.
Mid-market and enterprise B2B Deal sizes $10K–$250K, cycles of one to six months, three to twelve stakeholders.
Product-led with a sales assist Self-serve signups that need positioning, sequences and a CRM behind them.
Shape 03
1–40 people, no CMO Often a generalist marketer or an agency you inherited; no one owns the system.
One accountable owner A founder or a revenue lead who can make decisions in a 45-minute call.
Ready to own what gets built Every account, asset and automation lands in your name, not mine.

Start with a conversation.

Thirty minutes on where your go-to-market stands. If a diagnostic makes sense, it starts there. If it doesn't, I'll tell you what I'd do instead.

Book a call

No deck, no pitch.

Every engagement opens the same way.

Two weeks of diagnosis, a ranked roadmap, a decision in week three, then a fixed allowance of work sized to what the audit finds. One operator, systems that hand off, and you own everything from day one.

How an engagement works

Four phases · every engagement · same order
Surveyor at work: reconnaissance and 90-day traverse
FIG. 01 · RECONNAISSANCE
1 Weeks 1–2 · decision week 3

Audit: the Funnel & Stack Audit

A fixed-scope diagnosis with no ongoing commitment. Half a week of discovery (intake pack, kickoff, stakeholder interviews), then a week of research, then the deliverable. It's the opening of every engagement, and for some companies it's the whole engagement.

{{ a.t }} {{ a.d }}
You get One polished audit document and a strategy call in week three. Yours to run, with or without me.
Book the audit call
{{ p.no }} {{ p.weeks }}

{{ p.name }}

{{ p.d }}

You get {{ p.gate }}

Four ways to continue

After the audit, the roadmap is yours. Pick work off the menu as you need it, or take an ongoing engagement that bundles a fixed allowance of work with a standing cadence. What changes is how much gets built and how close I sit to the team.

{{ t.term }} Most common

{{ t.name }}

{{ t.tag }}
The work {{ t.allow }} {{ t.allowNote }}
{{ i }}
Experiments

Where the audit supports it, I'll steer you toward an Experiment over a stack of deliverables: a written hypothesis, the list, sequence, page and automation to test it, four to six weeks live, and a read-out that ends in an explicit kill, iterate or scale call. It produces a result, not three assets.

Four things founders say

If one of these is your sentence, the shape of the engagement is already known. The audit confirms it.

{{ pl.name }} {{ pl.tier }}

"{{ pl.trigger }}"

What gets built
{{ sp }}

Not sure which fits?

Everyone starts with the same two weeks. In week three you'll have a ranked roadmap, and we'll both know whether à la carte, Build, Scale or Embedded is the right next step.

Book a call

No deck, no pitch.
About

The operator behind the practice.

I'm Kyle Self. I've built the go-to-market function twice, from the first dollar, in two businesses that had nothing in common: a cooler brand that went on Shark Tank and a benefits company selling to home care agencies. Self Help Co is that job, done for one company at a time.

Kyle Self in conversation, cowboy hat and bolo tie
Kyle Self · Philadelphia, PA
Vitable Health
$100K→$20M
ARR while I ran marketing
Six years as the first marketing hire, seed through Series A. Positioning, site, CRM and outbound built from nothing.
Vitable Health
276
qualified meetings a month
Booked through cold email outreach, paid channels and SEO/AEO content, feeding 15 SDRs and 9 AEs.
Vitable Health
41%
of pipeline from owned work 
$1.46M in new ARR from channels I ran directly, on an ICP narrowed to home care agencies near 50 employees.
Kanga Coolers
$0→$2M+
revenue, bootstrapped
Paid social, search and email running $2K a day at 4:1 ROAS, plus the pitch that closed Mark Cuban on Shark Tank.
Kanga Coolers
$500K+
B2B Sales from ABM
Custom coolers sold to Bud Light, High Noon and Natty Light with micro-targeted creative, one brand at a time.

I've done this twice. The second time was nothing like the first.

Two companies, two playbooks
2017–2020 · Greenville, SC · Co-founder, Head of Marketing

Kanga Coolers

Five of us started Kanga in a Clemson entrepreneurship class. The product was a koozie for an entire case of beer; the first 150 sold locally in three weeks.

I ran marketing from the first sale to $2M+ in annual revenue, bootstrapped, and drafted the pitch that got us a deal with Mark Cuban on Shark Tank.

Consumer D2C is a paid-media and content game, so that's what I built: a prospecting and retargeting program running $2K a day at 4:1 ROAS across paid social, search and email, and an organic audience of over a million followers.

What I built
The ABM program that sold $500K+ of custom coolers to Bud Light, High Noon and Natty Light, with micro-targeted creative, one brand at a time
Positioning, ICP, the tech stack, the Shopify store, creative production and the analytics behind all of it
A monthly YouTube series, "The Fun Factory", that the 15- to 60-second ads were cut from
2020–2026 · Philadelphia, PA · First Marketing Hire, Founding Team

Vitable Health

I joined Vitable as its first marketing hire, before it had $100K in ARR, and stayed through $20M. B2B benefits is an outbound and enablement game, so that's what I built.

The outbound program became the company's primary revenue channel: 276 qualified meetings a month, feeding 15 SDRs and 9 AEs, on an ICP I narrowed to franchised home care agencies approaching 50 employees. That focus is what held ACV at $20K and the sales cycle at 30 days.

In 2025 the work I owned directly produced 41% of pipeline and $1.46M in new ARR.

What I built
The revenue infrastructure: CRM, attribution, lifecycle automation, reporting, and the company's first pipeline waterfall model
The brand redesign, the website, and every sales enablement asset: decks, one-pagers, battlecards, four gated calculators, an interactive product demo
The case for MEC and ICHRA plans, which turned a primary-care product into an end-to-end benefits platform

Same person, opposite playbooks. That range is the practice: one operator who can decide what the go-to-market should be, then build it. Not a strategist who hands off a deck, and not a production shop waiting on a brief.

On the record.

Don't take my word for it
Kyle on site in the early Kanga Coolers days
Kanga Coolers · Greenville, SC
01 · Shark Tank

Pitched Kanga to the Sharks. Left with a deal from Mark Cuban.

Kyle Self, Shopify Masters
Shopify Masters
02 · Shopify Masters

Interviewed on building a D2C brand from a college apartment: surveys, long-form content, and the ads cut from it.

Kyle Self
Kyle Self · Philadelphia, PA
03 · LinkedIn

The long version, and the people who'll vouch for it.

Three things I believe about go-to-market.

Point of view
01

The function is collapsing into one seat.

What took a department five years ago (positioning, content, web, ops, outbound) is now owned by one person or a very small team, with AI carrying the production load. Self Help Co is built for that shape. It's why a single operator can hand you a landing page, a sales kit, or an enriched prospect list in days rather than sprints.

02

Get the top of the funnel right first.

Positioning is the highest-leverage decision you'll make. At Vitable, narrowing the ICP to one segment did more for ACV and cycle time than any campaign I ran. Everything downstream, from channels to content to sales process, should react to what's working at the top, not be planned ahead of it.

03

Systems, not headcount.

Every deliverable I ship is built to run without me: a documented pipeline, a CRM you own, a list that refreshes itself. If the work needs a person managing it every day, it isn't on my menu, and I'll tell you who to hire.

Human AI-assisted Automated
Every line of every roadmap I write carries one of these.
30 minutes · No commitment

Start with a conversation.

Thirty minutes on where your go-to-market stands, and whether a diagnostic is the right next step. If I'm not the right person, I'll say so on the call.

Book a call

No deck, no pitch.
Work

Two companies. One operator. Here's what got built.

Everything on this page I built or ran myself, at a D2C cooler brand that went on Shark Tank and a B2B benefits company I took from under $100K to $20M in ARR. It's sorted by what you'd hire me for, not by where I worked.

Drafting room, halftone collage Fig. 12 · The work Scale 1:1 276 / mo $0 → $2M

Three pieces that explain the practice.

Start here
{{ c.media.alt }}
{{ c.media.cap }}
{{ c.media.label }}
{{ t.label }} {{ c.company }} {{ c.years }}Confirm

{{ c.title }}

Role{{ c.role }}Confirm Situation{{ c.situation }} Built{{ c.built }}Confirm
{{ c.resultNum }} {{ c.resultText }}

Sorted by what you'd hire me for.

Everything else

Nothing filed under this filter yet.
{{ g.name }}{{ g.count }}
{{ c.media.alt }}
{{ c.media.cap }}
{{ c.media.label }}
{{ c.meta }}Confirm
{{ t.label }} {{ c.company }} {{ c.years }}Confirm

{{ c.title }}

Role{{ c.role }}Confirm Built{{ c.built }}Confirm Result{{ c.result }}Confirm

Design I do when nobody's paying for it.

Off the clock

A poster series for artists I listen to, and logos drawn for friends and one-off clients. Not the day job; it's here because design is part of how I think, and you should see it before you hire me for it. Confirm section

{{ c.media.alt }}
{{ c.media.cap }}
{{ c.media.label }}
{{ c.caption }}Confirm
One-off marksLogos drawn for friends and small clients
{{ c.alt }}
{{ c.caption }}Confirm
30 minutes · No commitment

Want one of these built for you?

Every piece on this page is on the Engagements menu at a fixed scope and a fixed price. Thirty minutes on which one your funnel actually needs.

No deck, no pitch.
{{ modalUrl }}