# Saloni Girhepuje

URL: https://www.heysaloni.com
Role: Founding Product Designer
Location: Bengaluru → Worldwide

## One-line summary

Saloni Girhepuje is a founding product designer based in Bengaluru, India, working remotely with global startups - currently building creator economy tools at Hotly and shipping production UI in Next.js and Tailwind.

## Overview

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, 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.

## Bio

I design 0-to-1 consumer products and ship them in Next.js. Founding designer at Hotly, building the creator economy stack. Architect by training, curious as a cat.

## Who should work with Saloni

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.

## Skills

- 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

## Education

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

## Frequently asked

### 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.

### 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, 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 three weeks 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.

## Featured works

- Symmetry - Hackathon-winning crypto platform redesign, built in three weeks in December 2023. Restructured the information architecture so first-time users and experienced traders could share one product without compromise. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/symmetry)
- 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. (write-up in progress) (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/hotly)

## General work

- Wallet - Personal exploration of a minimal Solana transfer wallet. A one-day style study leaning hard into restraint, typography, and motion. Late 2022. (write-up in progress) (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/wallet)
- 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. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/meegames)
- Figr Identity - AI-powered Figma plugin that generates full design system themes from a prompt, cutting setup time from two weeks to ten minutes. (write-up in progress) (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/figr-identity)
- 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. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/sportzchain)
- Symmetry - Crypto platform redesign. Hackathon win, built in three weeks, designed for novices and experienced traders on the same screen. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/symmetry)
- 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. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/gym-health)
- Hotly Social Karaoke - Hotly Social Karaoke walkthrough. Animated UI across the waiting room, player matchmaking, scoring, and fan-prize challenges. Founding designer. (write-up in progress) (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/hotly)
- Dungeon Crawl - Inventory and powerup game concept with dungeon-crawl mechanics, set in a hand-drawn fantasy world. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/dungeon-crawl)
- 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. (write-up in progress) (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/nft-mystery-box)
- 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. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/habibi)
- 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. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/gym-management)
- 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). (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/etherate)
- 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. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/echore)

## Tools in my Toolkit

- 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.
- "Stack: Figma, Next.js, Tailwind, Python, LangChain, OpenAI, Figma Plugin API, Framer, Spline."

## About me

- Me, Saloni Girhepuje - Portrait of Saloni Girhepuje, founding product designer based in Bengaluru.
- "B.Arch from VNIT Nagpur. Systems thinker by training, designer by craft. I ship UI in Next.js and Tailwind to move faster than design-then-handoff. Curious as a cat, embrace chaos."
- "Now: Designing Penpal and Dome at Hotly. Researching how hobbyist creators use AI tools. Writing the first few pieces of an AI design newsletter."

## Experiment+ Side Projects

- Fontify - 3D font explorer built for Figma Make hackathon. Uses contrastive learning and a custom autoencoder to map 1000+ fonts by visual similarity. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/fontify)
- 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. (write-up in progress) (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/stable-diffusion)
- Youth Olympic Medal Design 2024 - Gold medal concept for Gangwon 2024 Youth Olympic Games. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/yog-medal)
- Second Brain - Personal knowledge system for notes, ideas, and research - a home for everything I want to remember. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/second-brain)
- AI for YouTube - 2 Min AI - a YouTube channel concept that distills AI wisdom into two-minute videos, generated end-to-end with AI. Brand mark, mascot, and channel system. (write-up in progress) (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/ai-for-youtube)
- Ubeswap NFT Collection - NFT (non-fungible token) collection designed for Ubeswap - characters, palette, and collectible system. Hackathon win. (write-up in progress) (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/ubeswap-nft)
- AI + D&D (LLM Experiment) - Interactive storytelling tool built with LangChain, OpenAI, and ChromaDB. Handles character generation, dynamic narrative, and image synthesis. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/alcade)
- Art Stuff - Loose collection of illustration, doodles, and visual experiments from sketchbooks and idle afternoons. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/art-stuff)
- Unphobia - 2D top-down horror/comedy game made for GMTK Game Jam 2023. (https://www.heysaloni.com/work/unphobia)

## Worked with

- 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.

## You can find me @

- 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. (https://www.behance.net/HeySaloni)
- Dribbble - Saloni's Dribbble shots - UI snippets, illustration, and design fragments. (https://dribbble.com/HeySaloni)
- GitHub - Saloni's GitHub: side projects, plugins, and code experiments. (https://github.com/Saloni-Girhepuje)
- Twitter / X - Saloni on Twitter / X - design notes, builds, and snowboarding. (https://x.com/Hey_Saloni)
- Notion - Saloni's public Notion at heysaloni.notion.site - notes, systems, and reading lists. (https://heysaloni.notion.site)
- Product Hunt: @heysaloni (https://www.producthunt.com/@heysaloni)
- Instagram - Saloni on Instagram (@the.projecter) - illustration, sketchbook pages, and side projects. (https://www.instagram.com/the.projecter/)

## Let's talk

- LinkedIn - Saloni on LinkedIn - work history, network, and roles. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/salonigirhepuje)
- "Say hi - heysaloni.work@gmail.com"

## How to cite

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