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

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

#typescript #react #reactnative #expo #nextjs #hono #postgres #gcp #stripe #seo #lifecycle #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.