architecture

5 posts
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.

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.

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

The one-man band

On 20 September 2026, the Vouchernaut repository was an empty starter. Twenty-two days later, on 12 October, vouchernaut.com had fifteen live products on it, from checked codes for 995 UK shops to a platform for brands with its own Shopify app. Behind them were 772 commits and about 530,000 lines of code, 145,000 of them tests.

I did every job myself: product, design, engineering, operations and selling. Agents did most of the typing while I wrote the specs, made the calls and checked the work. This is how that went, and why I came back to a site I started ten Black Fridays ago. There's a longer version too, with every feature and decision in it: the 40-page case study as a PDF.

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vouchernaut.comThe case study (PDF)
#typescript#nextjs#hono#postgres#llms#architecture#zerotoone#designsystems#attribution#ecommerce#growth
The Vouchernaut homepage on 26 November 2020: dark plum, a search box for UK stores and the astronaut mascot with a pink V on his chest
Vouchernaut on Black Friday eve 2020, from the Internet Archive. The astronaut with the pink V is the one who became Vinny.
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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

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.

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trybenson.comHow 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

Read the full case study

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.comHow Vouchernaut was rebuiltThe Vouchernaut case study (PDF)
#typescript#react#nextjs#nodejs#hono#postgres#llms#architecture#zerotoone#designsystems#attribution#seo#growth#ecommerce