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•GrowthRunner

GrowthRunner

Analytics auditing in Chrome DevTools

Design & engineering · Built the extension and audit workflow

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GrowthRunner is an analytics agency whose specialists check whether client websites record customer activity correctly. The engagement covered designing and building a Chrome DevTools extension that records user journeys, checks tracking events and produces audit evidence, replacing repetitive manual checks with a repeatable workflow.

Built a Chrome DevTools extension that records user flows, watches the dataLayer and flags missing or incorrect tracking.
Delivered the MVP in ten days and the finished build in two weeks.
Reduced the time for ten analytics audits to the time previously needed for one.
Used by GrowthRunner for clients including Wagamama and Net-a-Porter.

#typescript #react #growth #attribution

Doug Silkstone

getBenson

Coupon-extension protection for ecommerce

Founder & technical lead · Built, operated and sold the platform

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getBenson helped online retailers detect coupon extensions at checkout, prevent unwanted discount-code use and measure the effect on revenue and attribution. As founder and technical lead, the role covered rebuilding the MVP for production, running the platform, technical sales and customer onboarding through to the sale of the business.

Built a SaaS platform that detected and blocked browser-extension coupon leakage across 25M monthly sessions and 500+ stores.
Rebuilt the MVP as a typed, tested production system with real-time GraphQL revenue analytics.
Led technical sales and onboarded 80+ ecommerce brands.
Operated the product for nearly three years, then sold it.

#typescript #react #nextjs #nodejs #graphql #postgres #datadog #attribution

Doug Silkstone

Reach Robotics

MekaMon AR battle robot

Digital Marketing Manager · Led acquisition, ecommerce and measurement

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Led marketing and digital operations for MekaMon, an AR battle robot launched globally in Apple Stores. As Digital Marketing Manager, owned go-to-market strategy and delivery across acquisition, content, ecommerce, customer success and measurement.
Managed a £100K paid-marketing budget, alongside social media and influencer campaigns.
Led and curated the YouTube influencer campaign, including partnerships with SuperSaf and KhanFlicks, with campaign videos accumulating 750K+ views.
Hired and managed the marketing, video-production and customer-support teams, with responsibility for customer success.

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Reach Robotics hiring presentation (PDF)MekaMon digital strategy, 2017–18 (PDF)

#gtm #growth #lifecycle #attribution #ecommerce #leadership