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Dinners With Friends

Hosted dinners that help people make friends

CTO · Built the brand, booking platform, apps and search programme

Dinners With Friends brings people together to make friends over hosted meals at local venues across South West England. As CTO for the relaunch, the role covered the website, mobile apps, bookings, payments and host tools, alongside the brand, customer acquisition and analytics needed to run the business.

Relaunched a Social for Good concept that seats strangers around one table, first run twenty years ago by Pamela Silkstone.
Took the relaunch from a napkin sketch to an operating events business: brand, digital products, ticketing, operations and acquisition.
Built and ran the web product, the mobile apps and the internal operations platform.
Shipped the apps to the iOS App Store and Google Play with Expo.
Built ticketing and payments on Stripe Connect.
Built guest messaging, lifecycle email and AI-assisted admin tools.
Built search-led landing pages and event-filling campaigns.
Measured the whole journey, from first visit to booked seat.
Hosted 500+ guests across 50 events across South West England, selling out six to eight weeks ahead with waiting lists longer than the seats available.
Grew organic search from under 100 visitors a month to over 1,500 in one quarter, with impressions up from ~1.8k to ~950k and a million within six months.
Took first place for competitive local searches covering events, restaurants, spas, breaks, days out and regional guides.

dinnerswithfriends.co.uk

#typescript #react #reactnative #expo #nextjs #hono #postgres #gcp #stripe #seo #lifecycle #growth

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Doug Silkstone

From a napkin sketch to a year of full tables

In November 2024, Dinners With Friends was a revived idea and a napkin sketch. By the start of September 2026, it had welcomed more than 500 guests across 50 dinners. Dates were routinely selling out six to eight weeks ahead, and nearly all of the remaining 2026 calendar was booked.

Pamela Silkstone first ran the concept twenty years earlier: put people who have never met around one table, give them a host, and make the first conversation easier. I took the relaunch from idea to first version, first paying customers and a business with more demand than seats. Along the way I built the brand, website, booking system, internal tools, mobile app and the search programme that now brings new people in.

The search programme delivered 5,530 Google clicks in June–August 2026, up 66.1% on the previous three months, alongside 381,345 search impressions. Building and maintaining a library of local guides gave the business a way to be discovered by people looking for food, activities and places to meet across Exeter and Devon.

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dinnerswithfriends.co.uk

#typescript #react #reactnative #expo #nextjs #hono #postgres #railway #stripe #seo #ai #lifecycle #attribution #growth

Dinners With Friends homepage showing the event-discovery and booking experience — The live product joins discovery, social proof, availability and booking in one path.

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Doug Silkstone

Hogsend

Lifecycle messaging for software teams

Founder & CTO · Built the product, journey engine and cloud platform

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Hogsend lets software teams automate onboarding, customer messaging and retention in TypeScript rather than a visual workflow builder. The founder and CTO role covered the whole product: strategy, design, the journey engine, developer tools, cloud infrastructure and launch.

Built lifecycle marketing as code, with journeys reviewed in pull requests and tested before release.
Shipped the TypeScript development kit, journey engine, automated tests, Studio, command-line tools and MCP tools.
Built journeys that survive restarts, provider failures and releases while running for days or weeks.

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hogsend.com

#typescript #react #nextjs #nodejs #postgres #hatchet #lifecycle #attribution #docker #railway

Doug Silkstone

WithSeismic

Independent product engineering and growth

Founder · Scoped, built and supported 100+ client engagements

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WithSeismic is an independent product-engineering business that builds software, analytics and marketing automation for client teams. As founder and sole operator, the role spans finding the commercial problem, scoping the work, designing and building the solution, and supporting it after launch.

Delivered 100+ product-engineering engagements over 10 years for clients including Framer, The Motley Fool, Groupon, Contra and Weedmaps.
Scoped, priced, delivered and supported every technical build independently.
Runs a fixed ten-business-day, £12,000 Revenue Loop Sprint that finds one material commercial leak and ships one corrective system into production.

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withseismic.com

#typescript #react #nextjs #nodejs #python #llms #aws #gcp #postgres

Brian TigheHead of Technology @ The Motley Fool

Doug is a pro. I'd hire him again for any future marketing & technology initiatives.

Verified on Clutch•5.0

Doug Silkstone

Patrianna

Games for a social-casino platform

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

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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.