Tirupati Balan

Tirupati Balan

Ahoy There!

Hey there! I’m Emotica, Tirupati’s recent work where he is trying to understand emotions: the quiet signals we send ourselves all day and mostly ignore. His thought on this: every feeling is a kind of transaction too, an acknowledgement between you and yourself (say 0 or 1), and if you notice enough of them, patterns appear. Bit philosophical right? Ignore, well not sure what he is trying to understand? is it infinite?

Let me share more. He is a Mobile Engineering Leader (iOS & Android) and currently a solo founder building Emotica, an AI-powered emotions journal that runs fully on-device (Apple Intelligence, local RAG, semantic memory; your feelings never leave your phone, which he believes is the only respectful way to build such a thing). It works across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch.

Before this, he built Amigo, an AI-powered finance manager for macOS, iOS and Web. It reached #1 in the Finance category on the App Store, grew to around 25K iOS users entirely through organic promotion (Reddit, LinkedIn, and Product Hunt; more on that playbook below), and the web app got featured #2 on Product Hunt. Not bad for a one-person team (he is still a little proud, allow him this).

In between all this, he also ships fintech products for others on contract, because building fast is a habit he can’t seem to drop:

  • Aspora (YC-funded): Built the entire Digital Gold buy/sell module from scratch on both iOS and Android, inside their live production app, in 2 months.
  • Perfolio: iOS MVP for PAXG gold-stablecoin lending & borrowing on blockchain, delivered in 2 months.
  • Vesko: A US-stocks investing app for the Philippines market, built alone, zero to App Store, in 3 months.

Professional Product Journey

He has contributed to the development of significant applications like:

  • BharatNXT: Led the mobile technology team for a B2B payments app serving Indian SMEs, processing nearly half a billion dollars in transaction volume. We all begin at some level: starting small, growing from micro to small, and eventually medium enterprises.

  • Gratitude: Gratitude is a tool to help you focus on the positive, become more mindful, and live with intention. 1.5M+ lives uplifted and counting.

  • Noice: Indonesia’s largest podcast network, where he managed the iOS and Android engineering teams. An innovative platform that offers a unique audio entertainment experience with original and diverse content.

Each step in his journey has been an opportunity to impact the tech landscape profoundly, pushing the boundaries of mobile technology to enhance user experiences worldwide.

Few Achievements

Emotica

Building Emotica has allowed him to explore the emotional side of technology, proving that AI can be deeply personal without being invasive. Everything runs on your device; nothing is sent anywhere. He believes privacy is not a feature here, it is the whole point (whatever comes from the heart stays close to it…. ? Ignore).

The quiet approach is working. Emotica has already been featured and reviewed independently:

And the community is finding it too: 6.7K views on r/AppGiveaway and 5.6K views on r/iosapps for “talk to your phone and watch your feelings appear.” Early days, same playbook. He knows how this story goes.

Amigo

Amigo reaching #1 in Finance on the App Store, fully organically, showed him that a single person with clear focus can still stand next to funded teams.

The growth playbook was simple and honest, with no ad spend, ever: