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.

Work with me
Doug Silkstone
“Doug is a pro. I'd hire him again for any future marketing & technology initiatives.”
Brian TigheHead of Technology @ The Motley FoolClutch ↗

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

  • The Motley Fool
  • Groupon
  • Contra
  • NOW TV
  • Topman
  • STRV
  • Theory11
  • The Collective
  • The Donkey Sanctuary
  • Rightcharge
  • Foundry
  • W Series
  • Photologo

Which of these sounds like you?

Each one starts from a set price. We agree the scope on a call and you approve the quote before any work begins.

From £3,500Scope and quote agreed on the call

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 03

    I need one person who can own all of it.

    The work crosses half a dozen specialisms: a migration, a CDP, lifecycle email, the tracking that ties it together and the strategy behind it. But hiring for each one means several people, several handoffs and nobody accountable for whether the whole thing works. That gap is usually where big projects stall.

    So bring in one owner-operator. I’ve spent 15 years across engineering, growth and running my own businesses, so chances are I’ve already done the thing you need. I set the direction, build it, run the project and hand it over working. You deal with one person, and that person answers for the outcome.

    • Site and platform migrations, including the ones that stalled halfway
    • CDP and lifecycle marketing setups, from event design to the first live journey
    • Martech built or connected where off-the-shelf tools stop
    • Automation, scripting and developer tooling that removes manual work
    • Growth strategy tied to what actually gets shipped
    • Project management, so there is one person to ask and one person accountable

How it works

  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.

What clients say

More work & writing

Writing

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