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Growth Society

Ecommerce benchmarking for 200 UK brands

Product engineering · Built the interactive MVP in four weeks

Growth Society's ecommerce benchmarking project turned a static industry report into an interactive way to explore and compare brands. The engagement covered building the MVP, bringing performance data, brand profiles and analyst commentary together in a web product.

Built an ecommerce benchmarking report in a four-week MVP sprint.
Compared the UK's 200 largest brands using KPIs, screenshots and analyst commentary.

#ecommerce #growth #nextjs

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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.

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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.

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Doug Silkstone

Benson

Coupon-extension and AI-agent control for ecommerce

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

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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.

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trybenson.com How Benson was rebuilt

#typescript #react #nextjs #nodejs #hono #postgres #llms #architecture #zerotoone #attribution #ecommerce #growth

Doug Silkstone

Vouchernaut

Automated voucher-discovery platform

Founder & sole operator · Built the platform and SEO acquisition

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Vouchernaut was a voucher-discovery website that brought retailer offers together on automatically generated brand pages. As founder and sole operator, the role covered the data collection, website and search acquisition, turning a large catalogue of affiliate offers into a business that could run without a content team.

Built and operated a programmatic-SEO voucher platform for six years at 90% margins.
Automated offer data for 100,000+ brands into landing pages.
Reached 250K sessions a month with no paid spend or content team.

#typescript #nextjs #nodejs #puppeteer #postgres #seo #growth #ecommerce

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