growth

13 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.

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

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

Dinners With Friends

Hosted dinners that help people make friends

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

Read the full case study

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.

dinnerswithfriends.co.uk
#typescript#react#reactnative#expo#nextjs#hono#postgres#gcp#stripe#seo#lifecycle#growth
Doug SilkstoneWithSeismic · for Contra

Indy.ai

Freelance opportunity discovery for Contra

Product engineering · Built the extension and discovery pipeline

View Indy.ai project

Indy.ai is a Chrome extension built for Contra that helps freelancers discover work by finding opportunities in their LinkedIn and X feeds. The engineering engagement through WithSeismic covered the extension and discovery pipeline, connecting browser-based collection with AI analysis to turn social posts into structured job opportunities for Contra's marketplace.

Indy.ai by Contra on Product Huntcontra.com
#typescript#react#growth#gtm
Allison NultyHead of Product @ Contra

Doug was incredible to work with. He operated quickly & efficiently, and even proposed ways to improve the feature to exceed our expectations. 10/10!

Verified on Contra5.0
Doug SilkstoneGrowth Society

Growth Society

Ecommerce benchmarking for 200 UK brands

Product engineering · Built the interactive MVP in four weeks

View Growth Society project

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
Doug SilkstoneSTRV

STRV

Conversational lead generation

Product engineering · Built the enquiry and qualification interface

View STRV project

This project gave prospective STRV clients a conversational way to explain what they needed instead of filling out a contact form. The engineering work covered an AI chat interface that gathered project requirements and qualified enquiries before a sales conversation.

  • Built a conversational lead-generation interface.
  • Qualified inbound visitors inside the product instead of sending them through a form.
strv.com
#llms#react#typescript#growth
Doug SilkstoneGrowthRunner

GrowthRunner

Analytics auditing in Chrome DevTools

Design & engineering · Built the extension and audit workflow

View GrowthRunner project

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

Patrianna

Games for a social-casino platform

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

View Patrianna project
  • 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.
#typescript#react#nextjs#redux#postgres#datadog#growth#leadership
Doug Silkstone

Vouchernaut

Automated voucher-discovery platform

Founder & sole operator · Built the platform and SEO acquisition

View Vouchernaut project

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

Reach Robotics

MekaMon AR battle robot

Digital Marketing Manager · Led acquisition, ecommerce and measurement

View Reach Robotics project
  • 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.

Reach Robotics hiring presentation (PDF)MekaMon digital strategy, 2017–18 (PDF)
#gtm#growth#lifecycle#attribution#ecommerce#leadership