Saloni Girhepuje - Hey Saloni 🏂

Founding Product Designer·Bengaluru → Worldwide

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Figr design - Figma frame mocked with a "Design System" header and the figr plugin badge

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, built in three weeks, 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.

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.

Saloni Girhepuje smiling at camera - navy blazer over a heathered grey top, round glasses, against an off-white wall

😀Me, Saloni Girhepuje

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.

❤️Fontify: Similar font finder

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.

🤩Stable Diffusion

Youth Olympic Medal Design 2024

Gold medal concept for Gangwon 2024 Youth Olympic Games.

🥇Youth Olympic Medal Design 2024

Second Brain

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

🧠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.