HomeAbout Doug
Doug SilkstonePinned

Building products and businesses

I work across strategy, design, engineering, marketing, sales and operations. Over more than a decade, that has included work for Groupon, Vouchercloud, AWIN and The Motley Fool, product engineering for Framer, Contra and STRV, and founding and selling three software businesses of my own.

0:00 / 0:10

The person you hire ships it0:10

I’m good at taking a complicated business problem, making the work clear and seeing it through. That can mean deciding what to build, designing the experience, writing the software, finding customers or improving how the business runs. I work with colleagues across those disciplines and take responsibility for the work myself.

In my own businesses, product decisions, customer acquisition, sales, revenue and day-to-day operations have all been my responsibility. I bring that same connected view to client work, from shaping the offer to building the product and measuring whether it works for the business.

Measurement that connects to revenue

At Vouchercloud, I worked on unified affiliate tracking that brought together data from multiple networks and connected traffic and clicks to resulting revenue. I later worked with affiliate and product aggregation businesses including The Motley Fool, and operated my own affiliate business, Vouchernaut.

That work extends from event specifications, data layers and application tracking through ingestion pipelines, attribution and reporting. I have implemented measurement across GTM, GA4, Meta, Firebase, APIs, React and mobile applications, with data systems including BigQuery, Postgres, DuckDB, Timescale and Redis.

Products built and operated

At Benson, I rebuilt the original MVP into a production attribution system operating across 25 million monthly sessions and more than 500 stores. I led technical sales and onboarding for more than 80 ecommerce brands, operated the product for nearly three years and sold the business. I've since reacquired the brand and rebuilt Benson with a team of AI agents, relaunching it at trybenson.com ten days after the first commit.

As technical lead at RaceMake, I worked with Formula One and sim-racing telemetry to support statistical and AI-driven performance analysis. The implementation included high-frequency data pipelines, a Rust/Tauri desktop application and a React web application.

More recently, I built Hogsend, a TypeScript framework for growth engineering: identifying users, capturing behavioural events, responding across channels and measuring the effect. I also created a course on product-led growth and product analytics with PostHog.

Working together

Clients value the judgment I bring alongside the implementation. In her public review, Contra’s Allison Nulty highlights my communication, adaptability and suggestions that improved the feature beyond the original expectations.

I take responsibility from the initial specification through implementation, QA and release monitoring. Depending on the engagement, that can mean improving a measurement estate, building a customer-facing product, connecting acquisition to revenue or implementing onboarding and lifecycle systems.

I work on defined projects and embedded engagements. Explore my services, read my CV or email doug@withseismic.com.

withseismic.comLinkedInGitHub
#typescript#rust#cpp#architecture#zerotoone#growth#leadership
The last year on GitHub
@dougwithseismic
AugSepOctNovDecJanFebMarAprMayJunJul

Writing

Articles by Doug

Explore all articles →

No notes on this one.

Need someone to own work like this?

Tell me what you need to change, what your team has already tried and when you’d like to start.

Discuss a similar project

Hiring for your team? Send me the role.

Related posts

Doug Silkstone

Benson is back

On 24 September 2026, the Benson repository was an empty Turborepo starter. Ten days later, on 4 October, I relaunched Benson at trybenson.com with a Shopify app, a WooCommerce plugin, a dashboard, a marketing site, a press release and a series of explainer films behind it. By the end of the second week, the repository held 836 commits, 44 product specs and about 655,000 lines of TypeScript, with 785 test files among them.

The original roadmap for the same scope estimated 14 to 18 weeks. I built it with a team of AI agents doing most of the typing while I did the deciding.

Benson is still a work in progress. It's also the piece of work I'm proudest of, because it's the first time I haven't had to cut an idea down to fit the hours I had.

…

trybenson.com
#typescript#nextjs#hono#postgres#llms#architecture#zerotoone#attribution#ecommerce#growth
The Benson dashboard overview in a demo store, showing protected value, live controls and insights
The Benson overview in a demo store with sample data. It shows what's protected, which controls are live and the next step in the recommended playbook.
Read article
Doug Silkstone

Benson

Coupon-extension and AI-agent control for ecommerce

Founder & technical lead · Rebuilt and relaunched in ten days with AI agents

Read the full case study

Benson shows online stores which coupon extensions and AI shopping agents are in their sessions and what they cost, then lets them hide, cap or replace them with a holdout behind every change. The founder and technical lead role covered building, operating and selling the original getBenson platform, then reacquiring the brand and rebuilding it for the relaunch at trybenson.com.

  • Rebuilt Benson from an empty repository to a public relaunch at trybenson.com in ten days, against an original roadmap of 14 to 18 weeks.
  • Wrote the product as 44 PRDs and ran the build as an orchestrator, with AI agents delivering each task through tests, adversarial review and simplification: 836 commits and 785 test files in under two weeks.
  • Shipped ten apps and fifteen packages: a 2.5KB storefront loader, ingest on Redis Streams, Postgres with row-level security, a dashboard, an embedded Shopify admin, a WooCommerce plugin, a Cloudflare edge detector and an MCP server.

…

trybenson.comHow Benson was rebuilt
#typescript#react#nextjs#nodejs#hono#postgres#llms#architecture#zerotoone#attribution#ecommerce#growth
Doug Silkstone

RaceMake

Live telemetry and analysis for sim racers

Interim technical lead · Led architecture, team and delivery

View RaceMake project

RaceMake helps sim racers understand their driving through live car and lap data, AI-assisted analysis and interactive 3D visualisations. The interim technical leadership role covered architecture, team leadership and delivery across the desktop app, web app and the data pipelines connecting them.

  • Led architecture and delivery across a Rust/Tauri desktop app and React web app.
  • Rebuilt both clients around extensible high-frequency telemetry pipelines and per-game adapters.
  • Built an AI pit team and interactive 3D visualisations on top of live telemetry.
racemake.com
#rust#tauri#typescript#react#nextjs#telemetry#llms#leadership
Doug Silkstone

Patrianna

Games for a social-casino platform

Studio leadership · Hired the team and shipped five games to 1M players

View Patrianna project
  • Built an in-house game studio from zero and shipped five high-stakes React games to 1M players.
  • Hired and led the cross-functional frontend, game-development and QA team.
  • Owned monetisation, retention, experiments and telemetry.
  • Owned product architecture, delivery, team structure and production quality for a top-three social casino.
#typescript#react#nextjs#redux#postgres#datadog#growth#leadership