About Saloni Girhepuje

Saloni Girhepuje is a founding product designer with 5+ years of 0-to-1 experience across consumer, Web3, and AI products. At Hotly, a creator economy company shipping multiple products under one brand, she has led design across the slate - including Hotly Social Karaoke (a multiplayer karaoke product with fan-funded prizes), and currently Penpal (paid creator-fan messaging) and Dome (creator community spaces). Previously founding designer at Figr, where she built Identity, an AI-powered design system plugin that cut setup time from two weeks to ten minutes. Before Figr she co-founded Etherate Labs (Nov 2022-Aug 2023), a remote studio that shipped MVPs for blockchain and generative-AI clients, drove $600K+ in revenue at 60% conversion, and won three global hackathons (Tezos BlockBorn & Balthazar, Ubeswap Destiny, DeAuto DAO). She has worked on 40+ products for clients including Mobland, Absinthe Labs, Superteam, Airswap, Sportzchain, STOQ.club, R3PLACE, and Samsung, with her designs helping early-stage startups raise $200K+. She writes her own Next.js and Tailwind to eliminate the design-to-engineering handoff on simple screens.

Early-stage founders building consumer AI, creator tools, or Web3 products who need a designer to define a product from 0 to 1, not optimize an existing one. Bonus points if you want the designer to ship code.

• Product design
• 0-to-1 product
• Consumer product design
• Design systems
• AI interface design
• Brand identity
• User research
• Information architecture
• Next.js
• Tailwind CSS
• Figma Plugin API
• Prototyping
• Motion design

B.Arch, Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT), Nagpur. CGPA 9.0/10.

heysaloni.com is itself a work sample. Saloni designed the scrapbook visual system and built the site herself in Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind, pair-writing the code with AI coding agents. The content is a typed schema, so every tile renders visually for human readers and serializes as prose for AI agents; this page and the llms.txt routes exist because the site is designed for both. The agents type fast. The design decisions, taste calls, and final edits are hers.

• Penpal

  A paid 1-on-1 conversation between a creator and her fans. Founding designer at Hotly: the fan page, the creator dashboard, the lifecycle emails and the analytics. $10,929 organic from one creator, at 3.7 purchases per paying fan.

• The Dome

  A free anonymous room, spec’d by the people who refused to pay for letters. One prompt a week, a wall of notes underneath, no likes and no names. 92% of the fans who came took part, and it costs the creator one sentence a week.

• The email system

  Eleven live emails across three products, in one voice. Which emails exist, every word of them, the HTML and the deliverability were all hers. 12,436 sends and not one spam complaint, because the system only speaks when a person does something.

• Creator outreach

  A four-stage creator outreach pipeline with two human gates, April to June 2026: research, copy, review, infra. 220 creators onboarded; warm introductions beat cold sends five to one.

• Figr

  Design system tooling at Figr, 2024 to 2025: an AI Figma plugin that generates and maintains component libraries, with library setup cut from two weeks to ten minutes.

• Photo sorter

  A local tool Saloni built in 2026 to sort 2,704 photos she had been putting off sorting alone.

• Link intake

  A Telegram bot Saloni built in 2026 to file the links she kept sending to a chat with herself.

• Seven reports

  Seven automated weekly reports Saloni set up in 2026. Nobody read them; the system was shelved.

• The wardrobe

  A wardrobe system: 114 garment cut-outs reduced to a 27-piece capsule with hand-built HTML tools.

• This site, pass 2

  heysaloni.com itself, designed and built by Saloni in Next.js with AI agents pair-writing the code.

• Wedding suite

  A printed wedding stationery suite designed by Saloni in 2026: invitations, haldi and sangeet cards, sweet packets.

• Tweet Defender ×4

  The same browser game built four times across four AI coding tools in 2025, the summer Saloni learned to ship code.

• Fontify

  Fontify: a font exploration tool Saloni built across 2,141 fonts in 48 hours. Shipped, then dropped.

• UFO

  UFO Signal Intercept, a green-phosphor browser arcade game Saloni vibe-coded in 2025, playable at /play.

• Hotly music landing

  The dark-mode landing page for the music-era Hotly, art-directed by Saloni in 2025.

• hotly.gg reels

  The Instagram reels content engine Saloni ran for hotly.gg in 2025: raw-to-final pairs per game.

• Social Karaoke

  Hotly Social Karaoke, a multiplayer karaoke product with fan-funded prizes, designed by Saloni before the Penpal pivot.

• Ads funnel

  Ad creatives and the onboarding flow they led into, designed by Saloni for Hotly in 2025.

• Figr identity

  Figr Identity, an AI design-system plugin for Figma Saloni designed as founding designer at Figr, 2024 to 2025.

• MiniMash

  MiniMash (Project Nitro): a pack of mini games Saloni designed and shipped into hotly.gg.

• Stable Diffusion, locally

  Running Stable Diffusion locally and training it on her own work: an AI image experiment by Saloni.

• Mee games

  Mee Games: a pitch deck and game concept Saloni designed in 2024.

• Outfit capsule

  The first pass of the wardrobe system: garment cut-outs and an outfit builder.

• Echore

  Echore, a Chrome extension for blockchain escrow, built by Saloni and Etherate Labs; won the Tezos BlockBorn & Balthazar hackathon.

• Alcade

  Alcade: an AI dungeon master for Dungeons & Dragons Saloni built, then pitched.

• YOG medal

  A medal design concept Saloni submitted for the Gangwon 2024 Youth Olympic Games. Not selected.

• Symmetry

  A redesign of the Symmetry crypto platform Saloni made in three weeks; won the hackathon, December 2023.

• 2 Min AI

  2 Min AI: a YouTube channel Saloni ran for a month in 2023, one AI explainer a day.

• Pune DAO

  A small brand system for Pune DAO: logo, swatches, type, and five logo-reveal animations with a dhol-tasha cue.

• Ubeswap NFT

  An AI-generated NFT collection for Ubeswap by Saloni and Etherate Labs; won the Ubeswap Destiny hackathon.

• OCG Punks

  OCG Punks: a generative PFP collection built from 10,100 hand-drawn SVG trait layers with rarity weights.

• Absinthe

  Brand identity and website for Absinthe Labs, a client delivery by Saloni, 2023 to 2024.

• Art, 2018 to 2022

  Ink, pixel and portrait studies Saloni drew between 2018 and 2022.

• Etherate

  Etherate Labs, the remote studio Saloni co-founded (2022 to 2023) that shipped MVPs for blockchain and generative-AI clients.

• I-Game-Robot

  The DeAuto DAO game-design hackathon entry; placed second in Game Design Planning.

• Wallet

  A one-day style study of a minimal Solana transfer wallet: restraint, typography, motion. Late 2022.

• Mee Games

  Product UI and brand for Mee Games, a Web3 gaming aggregator of 50+ titles with one gaming ID. Two-week sprint, 2024.

• Symmetry dashboard

  The Symmetry portfolio dashboard, designed for novices and experienced traders on the same screen.

• Echore

  A Chrome extension for blockchain escrow and live transaction tracking; won the Tezos BlockBorn & Balthazar hackathon.

• Hotly Social Karaoke

  Animated UI for Hotly Social Karaoke: waiting room, matchmaking, scoring and fan-prize challenges.

• Etherate Labs

  Brand for Etherate Labs, the studio Saloni co-founded (2022 to 2023), building MVPs in blockchain and generative AI.

• Gym Health Companion

  A fitness companion app that logs water, food and workouts and syncs to a gym admin dashboard. 2021.

• Habibi

  A SocialFi concept made to anchor a fundraising pitch: a warmer, community-first creator economy. August 2023.

• NFT Mystery Box

  An NFT Mystery Box concept that opened talks with Samsung and was built out for one of their apps, 2020 to 2022.

• Dungeon Crawl

  An inventory and power-up game concept with dungeon-crawl mechanics, set in a hand-drawn fantasy world.

• Sportzchain

  An engage-to-earn sports-fan platform: landing, app and dashboards, as one of two designers. 2021.

• Gym Management

  The admin half of the gym pair: bookings, trainer availability, scheduling and payments. 2021.

• UFO

  UFO Signal Intercept, a browser arcade game, playable at /play.

• Symmetry

  A three-week redesign of the Symmetry crypto platform; hackathon winner, 2023.

• OCG Punks

  A generative PFP system built from 10,100 hand-drawn SVG layers.

• Ubeswap

  An AI-generated NFT collection; Ubeswap Destiny hackathon winner.

• Figr identity

  The Figr brand and splash animation, designed by Saloni.

• hotly.gg reel

  Instagram reels Saloni cut for the hotly.gg games in 2025.

• Fontify

  A font exploration tool across 2,141 fonts, built in 48 hours.

• Symmetry

  A three-week redesign of the Symmetry crypto platform; hackathon winner, 2023.

• Hotly brand

  The early Hotly brand: palette, type, icons and slides.

• Penpal letters

  Motion work from Penpal: the fan door and the letters.

• OCG Punks

  A generative PFP system built from 10,100 hand-drawn SVG layers.

• UFO

  UFO Signal Intercept, a browser arcade game, playable at /play.

• Penpal

  A paid 1-on-1 conversation between a creator and her fans. Founding designer at Hotly: the fan page, the creator dashboard, the lifecycle emails and the analytics. $9,642 organic in six months from one creator, at 3.7 purchases per paying fan.

• The email system

  Eleven live emails across three products, in one voice. Which emails exist, every word of them, the HTML and the deliverability were all mine. 12,436 sends and not one spam complaint, because the system only speaks when a person does something.

• The Dome

  A free anonymous room, spec’d by the people who refused to pay for letters. One prompt a week, a wall of notes underneath, no likes and no names. 1,435 notes, and it costs the creator one sentence a week.

• Symmetry

  Hackathon-winning crypto platform redesign, December 2023. Restructured the information architecture so first-time users and experienced traders could share one product without compromise.

• Hotly Social Karaoke

  Hotly Social Karaoke - a multiplayer karaoke product where fans join a waiting room, get matched up to play live around an artist’s tracks, and compete for fan-funded prizes. Founding designer at Hotly.

• Figr design system

  Design system tooling at Figr, 2024 to 2025: around 40 components, with library setup cut from two weeks to ten minutes.

• Creator outreach

  A four-stage cold outreach pipeline with two human gates, April to June 2026: research, copy, review, infra. 5,600 sends at 0.6% bounce; 360 cold sends, zero replies, one burnt domain.

• I didn’t know how to code

  June to September 2025: Tweet Defender built four times on four AI tools to learn what each could do. Two games made it into hotly.gg with real players; the pile now pushes to main.

• Bored of my own fonts

  August to September 2025, 48 hours of build with Sahil on the ML: about 100 prompts over one weekend. 2,141 fonts hung in one navigable space. Live with issues; no V2.

• 2,704 photos, sorting alone

  17 to 24 September 2026, all hers: a photo sorter that turned 2,704 photos into 364 decisions. Four features built, then removed.

• 98 links rotting in a chat with myself

  June to 1 October 2026, all hers: a link intake that filed 98 saved links in one go, after three rejected plans.

• Seven weekly reports nobody read

  May to September 2026, all hers: seven automated weekly reports, 270k words, none used. Cut to one task, prediction first.

• “Who cares? We all had fun.”
• MiniMash

  No code, just chaos: an AI game-generation product (2025), with an illustrated card for every game it could build.

• Symmetry

  Hackathon-winning crypto platform redesign, December 2023. Restructured the information architecture so first-time users and experienced traders could share one product.

• OCG Punks

  A generative PFP collection (2023): 10,100 hand-drawn trait layers with rarity weights, run through an art engine.

• Ubeswap NFT Collection

  NFT collection designed for Ubeswap (2022): characters, palette, and collectible system in 3D. Hackathon win.

• Absinthe Labs

  Brand identity and marketing-site design for a web3 loyalty protocol (2023 to 2024): logo system, covers, story panels, motion.

• Figr identity

  Identity and splash motion for Figr (2024 to 2025), an AI design-systems startup whose Figma plugin generates and maintains component libraries.

• Pune DAO + Aurora

  Full brand identity for a city DAO (2022 to 2023): logo, palette, type, an animated reveal and a dhol-tasha sound cue. Aurora was the companion logo project.

• The wedding suite

  A full invitation identity for one wedding (2026): Haldi, Sangeet and ceremony cards, adapted for Instagram, Pinterest and print.

• Echore

  Hackathon-winning Chrome extension for blockchain escrow and real-time transaction tracking (2023), built at Etherate Labs.

• Youth Olympic Medal Design 2024

  Gold medal concept for the Gangwon 2024 Winter Youth Olympic Games, entered in the IOC’s open medal design competition (March 2023).

• Art stuff

  Illustration, sketch timelapses, Inktobers and visual experiments from sketchbooks and idle afternoons, 2018 to 2022.

• “29 more things”
• Wallet

  Personal exploration of a minimal Solana transfer wallet. A one-day style study leaning hard into restraint, typography, and motion. Late 2022.

• Mee Games

  Designed the product UI and brand identity for Mee Games, a Web3 gaming aggregator combining 50+ titles with a universal gaming ID, gas-fee reimbursement, and an AI assistant. Two-week freelance sprint in 2024 that fed into the team’s investor conversations.

• Figr Identity

  AI-powered Figma plugin that generates full design system themes from a prompt, cutting setup time from two weeks to ten minutes.

• Sportzchain

  Engage-to-Earn sports-crypto platform powered by $SPN, targeting 3.5B+ Asian sports fans with fan tokens, Watch-to-Earn, and fan commerce. Won the engagement off a scrappy Figma pitch prototype, then shipped landing, app, and user/team/admin dashboards as one of two designers in a six-person team. Doubled as PM. 2021.

• Symmetry

  Crypto platform redesign. Hackathon win, designed for novices and experienced traders on the same screen.

• Gym Health Companion

  Companion fitness tracker that pairs with a gym admin app. Logs water, food, and workout sessions, then syncs back to the admin dashboard. Mapped the flows, designed screens and animations end-to-end. Early-career project, 2021.

• Hotly Social Karaoke

  Hotly Social Karaoke walkthrough. Animated UI across the waiting room, player matchmaking, scoring, and fan-prize challenges. Founding designer.

• Dungeon Crawl

  Inventory and powerup game concept with dungeon-crawl mechanics, set in a hand-drawn fantasy world.

• NFT Mystery Box

  NFT Mystery Box concept that opened talks with Samsung and was developed for one of their consumer apps. Sold the idea in 2020-2021, built out through 2022. Samsung never released it. Sole designer at the start, joined later by a senior designer.

• Habibi

  SocialFi concept piece designed to anchor a fundraising pitch. A creator-fan economy with a warmer, community-first social texture than the tradeable-access platforms then on the market. August 2023.

• Gym Management

  Admin counterpart to Gym Health Companion. Manages client bookings, trainer availability, scheduling, payments, and holiday-driven unavailability. Designed as one half of a paired consumer-plus-admin system. 2021.

• Etherate Labs

  Co-founded Etherate Labs (Nov 2022 - Aug 2023), a remote studio building MVPs in blockchain and generative AI. Led product and design strategy across 7+ client engagements and 5+ in-house projects. Drove 60% conversion and $600K+ in revenue, shipped four MVPs in 2-4 week sprints, and won three global hackathons (DeAuto DAO, Ubeswap Destiny, Tezos BlockBorn & Balthazar).

• Echore

  Hackathon-winning Chrome extension for blockchain escrow and real-time transaction tracking. Won the Tezos BlockBorn & Balthazar Hackathon during the Etherate Labs era. Shipped with UI, working prototype, brand identity, and pitch deck. Later pitched to the Mantle network for cross-chain expansion.

• Design

  Figma, Framer, Webflow, Sketch, and FlutterFlow.

• Video

  After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, Audacity, and Descript.

• Notes

  Obsidian, Notion, and Trello.

• Illustrations

  Photoshop, Illustrator, Stable Diffusion, and Procreate.

• 3D Animation

  Blender, Spline, Maya, and SketchUp.

• Others

  Unity, ChatGPT, GitHub, PowerPoint, and Canva.

• “Figma to design. Next.js and Tailwind to ship. Python and LangChain to tinker.”
• Me, Saloni Girhepuje

  Portrait of Saloni Girhepuje, founding product designer based in Bengaluru.

• “We create buildings. People make it their home.”
• “Once we know what works, making systems around them would be easier.”
• “Hotly · Figr (9k to 50k users during tenure) · Absinthe · OCG · Mobland · Superteam”
• “Leading design on Penpal and Dome at Hotly. Researching how hobbyist creators actually use AI tools. Writing an AI design newsletter.”
• Fontify

  2,141 fonts hung in one navigable 3D space, arranged by how they feel rather than by name. Built over a weekend with Sahil Girhepuje: he trained the models, Saloni designed and built everything you can see.

• Stable Diffusion

  Self-taught experiments running Stable Diffusion locally. Late 2023 to early 2024. The point was less about the images and more about the muscle: getting hands-on with bleeding-edge AI tooling before it had a friendly UI.

• Youth Olympic Medal Design 2024

  Gold medal concept for the Gangwon 2024 Winter Youth Olympic Games, entered in the IOC’s open medal design competition (March 2023). Vector artwork split into material masks and rendered as engraved gold in Blender; the entry lives in the competition’s public gallery.

• Second Brain

  Personal knowledge system for notes, ideas, and research - a home for everything I want to remember.

• 2 Min AI

  2 Min AI - a five-week experiment in running a real YouTube channel to learn how the machine works: 19 shorts cut from long-form content about AI, 11,570 views, 30 subscribers, and a working feel for the algorithm.

• Ubeswap NFT Collection

  NFT (non-fungible token) collection designed for Ubeswap - characters, palette, and collectible system. Hackathon win.

• Alcade: D&D with AI

  AI text-adventure game built at Etherate Labs (2022-2023). One playable chapter with AI-generated scene art, character creation, and NPCs with memory - built with LangChain, OpenAI, and ChromaDB, then pitched to blockchain networks.

• The Games Pile

  Six playable browser games Saloni vibe-coded solo during Hotly's games era (June-September 2025) - a satirical tower defense with an AI ally that sometimes betrays you (built four times with four different AI tools), Piano Tiles, a UFO abduction arcade game, click-to-place Tetris, an escalating-rules password puzzle, and a barnyard wave-shooter. Two shipped into the hotly.gg product as game plugins. This is where she first learned frontend coding, a skill she has used extensively since - Hotly's landing pages, and heysaloni.com itself.

• Art Stuff

  Loose collection of illustration, doodles, and visual experiments from sketchbooks and idle afternoons.

• Unphobia

  2D top-down horror/comedy game made for GMTK Game Jam 2023.

• Worked on 40+ Projects

  Shipped 40+ products across Web3, fintech, consumer, and AI - including Superteam, GOAT, Deauto, and Sportzchain.

• With 20+ Clients

  Worked with 20+ clients across early-stage startups and global teams - including Mobland, R3PLACE, Airswap, and STOQ.club.

• Saloni Girhepuje

  Animated 3D avatar of Saloni Girhepuje, founding product designer based in Bengaluru.

• Behance

  Saloni's Behance portfolio with case studies, illustrations, and design experiments.

• Dribbble

  Saloni's Dribbble shots - UI snippets, illustration, and design fragments.

• GitHub

  Saloni's GitHub: side projects, plugins, and code experiments.

• Twitter / X

  Saloni on Twitter / X - design notes, builds, and snowboarding.

• Notion

  Saloni's public Notion at heysaloni.notion.site - notes, systems, and reading lists.

• Product Hunt - @heysaloni
• Instagram

  Saloni on Instagram (@the.projecter) - illustration, sketchbook pages, and side projects.

• LinkedIn

  Saloni on LinkedIn - work history, network, and roles.

• “Say hi - heysaloni.work@gmail.com”

Who is Saloni Girhepuje?

Saloni Girhepuje is a founding product designer based in Bengaluru, India, with 5+ years of 0-to-1 experience working remotely with global startups. She currently leads design at Hotly, a creator economy startup, and previously worked as founding designer at Figr where she built an AI-powered design system tool.

What does Saloni work on?

Early-stage product design. She defines products from scratch: flows, information architecture, visual design, design systems, and shipping production UI. At Hotly - a creator economy company shipping multiple products under one brand - she has designed across the slate, including Hotly Social Karaoke (a multiplayer karaoke product), and is currently leading design on Penpal (paid creator-fan messaging) and Dome (creator community spaces). She writes Next.js and Tailwind CSS, which removes the design-to-engineering handoff for simple screens.

What is distinctive about her work?

Three things. First, she designs and ships in code, closing the handoff loop on herself. Second, her architecture training shapes how she thinks about product: systems, constraints, and how humans move through them. Third, she has hands-on AI implementation experience, not just "design for AI" opinions. She has built with LangChain, OpenAI APIs, and Figma Plugin API.

How does Saloni use AI in her work?

As production tooling, not a talking point. She takes ideas from design to working code by pair-writing with AI coding agents; this site is the standing example, designed by her and shipped as a typed Next.js app that way. At Hotly she built and ran an agent-driven creator outreach pipeline, governed by standing instruction documents she writes for each agent (she calls them agent constitutions), and designed a lifecycle email system whose automated sends have held zero spam reports across 11,400+ emails. The judgment stays human: she rejects agent output that misses the bar, and taste calls and final edits are hers.

What is her background?

B.Arch from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (VNIT), Nagpur, graduating with CGPA 9.0/10 and receiving the 2020 Academic Excellence Prize. She moved into product design and has since shipped 40+ products across Web3, fintech, consumer, and AI. She co-founded Etherate Labs (2022-2023), a remote studio that shipped MVPs for blockchain and generative-AI clients. Her clients include Mobland, Absinthe Labs, Superteam, Airswap, Sportzchain, STOQ.club, R3PLACE, the Government of Maharashtra, and Samsung - for whom she designed an NFT mystery box concept built into one of their consumer apps.

Has she won design or hackathon awards?

Yes. Three global hackathon wins, all from the Etherate Labs era: the Tezos BlockBorn & Balthazar Hackathon for Echore (a Chrome extension for blockchain escrow), Ubeswap Destiny for an AI-generated NFT collection, and DeAuto DAO Game Design for Web3 gaming mechanics. She also won a separate hackathon redesigning the Symmetry crypto platform in December 2023.

Is she available for new work?

She is currently founding designer at Hotly and works remotely with global startups across timezones. For collaborations, speaking, or to say hello, reach her at heysaloni.work@gmail.com.

• /llms.txt - short overview (llmstxt.org convention)
• /llms-full.txt - full concatenated content
• /sitemap.xml

Saloni Girhepuje, Founding Product Designer. https://www.heysaloni.com