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Hogsend

Lifecycle messaging for software teams

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

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.
Shipped Hogsend Cloud in separate European and United States regions, plus a self-hosted Docker distribution.
Owned product strategy, design, architecture, positioning, analytics, documentation and launch.
Live at hogsend.com.

hogsend.com

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

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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

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

UK shopping guide, comparison tools and brand platform

Founder & sole operator · Rebuilt alone in 22 days with AI agents

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Vouchernaut is a UK shopping guide with checked codes for 995 shops, a shop, comparison tools for phones, broadband, energy and airport parking, What's On listings, guides and a platform for brands. The founder and sole operator role covered every job: building and running the original site alone from 2016 to 2022, then rebuilding it at vouchernaut.com in 22 days in 2026.

Rebuilt Vouchernaut from an empty repository to fifteen live products in 22 days: 772 commits and about 530,000 lines of code, 145,000 of them tests.
Wrote the specs and made the product calls while AI agents did the typing across 203 Claude Code sessions, with every result checked against its spec before it went live.
Shipped store pages for 995 UK shops, a shop of 5,220 products with price watch, a phone finder, a broadband checker, an energy comparison, 21,087 What's On listings, airport parking, discount hubs and group cashback.

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vouchernaut.com How Vouchernaut was rebuilt The Vouchernaut case study (PDF)

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

Doug Silkstone

Dinners With Friends

Hosted dinners that help people make friends

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

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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.

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dinnerswithfriends.co.uk