Doug Silkstone · Founder, builder & operator

I build products and the businesses around them.

I’m Doug, an engineer and founder with 15 years of experience building products and growing businesses. I’ve hired and led engineering teams, founded and sold three software businesses, and led growth strategies for multimillion-dollar Black Friday campaigns. Bring me into your team or give me a difficult problem to own.

I’ve worked with teams including Contra, Groupon and The Motley Fool.

Available for contracts, onsite in London or remotely. Open to the right permanent role.

• 01

  Engineering is too busy with the product to build for marketing.

  Your developers are rightly focused on the roadmap, but marketing needs things built too: an internal tool, an automated workflow, a CRM integration or a campaign landing page. The requests sit in the backlog while your team patches the gaps with spreadsheets and manual work.

  So I pick up the work that needs an engineer, and I don’t wait for a perfect ticket. I work with your team to understand the problem, decide what’s worth building and ship it to your engineering standards. That can mean a new tool, connected systems, automation or better analytics. Marketing gets what it needs, and your product team can stay focused on the roadmap.

  • Internal tools built around how your team actually works
  • Automations that replace repetitive tasks and manual handoffs
  • CRM, marketing platforms and business systems connected through integrations
  • Landing pages, experiments and site changes built and shipped in your codebase
  • Analytics, tracking and technical SEO fixes that make the results measurable
  • Code reviewed and released through your team’s existing process
  Site stuck in Framer or Webflow? Read the fix
  From £3,500Scope and quote agreed on the callBook 30 minutes
• 02

  There’s no bridge between marketing and engineering.

  Marketing has to write every ticket perfectly, but engineering builds exactly what the ticket says, and the SEO detail or tracking detail that actually mattered gets lost. The tracking ends up slightly wrong, so nobody fully trusts the numbers either.

  So I sit between the two teams. I understand SEO, analytics and growth, and I design and write the code, so the intent survives from brief to production. Changes ship the way they were meant, and the numbers agree with what really happened.

  • Marketing requests turned into technical specs that keep the intent
  • SEO, analytics and conversion changes built and checked on the live site
  • Tracking audited and repaired so dashboards reconcile with billing
  • Shared notes so both teams speak the same language after I leave
  From £3,500Scope and quote agreed on the callBook 30 minutes
• 03

  The big project has stalled.

  The site rebuild, the migration or the analytics setup started with good intentions, but it is half done, over budget and nobody owns it. Usually it stalled because nobody decided what it was actually for.

  So I start with strategy: what the project needs to achieve commercially, and what can be cut. Then I take ownership and ship it to production. The project finishes, and it finishes pointed at growth rather than at a checklist.

  • A written diagnosis of what is blocking the project and what it is for
  • A reduced scope tied to a commercial outcome, agreed before building
  • The working version shipped to production, tested and handed over
  • A priced roadmap for what remains
  From £3,500Scope and quote agreed on the callBook 30 minutes

1. A 30-minute call. You describe the problem, I tell you honestly whether I can fix it and roughly what it will take.
2. Scope and price in writing. What I will do, what you get and what I need from you. You approve before anything starts.
3. The work, then a review. Working changes, not a report. If there is more to do, you will have a priced plan for it.