Meet Florence Hinder of Thought Saver

Meet Florence Hinder Manzana resident and CEO of Thought Saver.

Florence Hinder is the CEO of Thought Saver and one of our residents here at Manzana. Thought Saver is a smart flashcard app to help people to integrate ideas and behaviours into their everyday life. Using behavioural change techniques, Thought Saver’s goal is to help users apply their new knowledge in the right contexts, to improve their own wellbeing.

We caught up with Florence to get to know her and her work:

How have your background and experiences led you toward developing Thought Saver?

A few things in my life have always been incredibly consistent: my burning desire to make the world a better place, my action-based characteristics, and my relentless pursuit of improvement. 

My life ambition is to have the most positive impact on the world I can, considering the most impactful problems I could contribute to solving alongside my skills, abilities, and life circumstances.

I have always been a highly motivated person, when I see something that isn't working or something I am not happy with, I will take action to fix it! I am good at learning new things and I am a jack of all trades (something I learned from my father). 

I have prioritised continuous learning in my life, reading regularly, because I intrinsically value learning new things! I also see learning as an impact multiplier; the more I learn, the more I can help make the world a better place. I’ve spent time thinking about the most effective ways to learn and take action in my life and realised how different it is from what you are taught at University. I think learning is for everyone, not just for those studying for exams. If you want to improve your life, I am sure there is something you could learn about and take that knowledge into action.

I've always wanted to build my own startup, it suits my personality, provides me the opportunity to challenge myself and grow, and test out how good I would be at it! I built a startup at University, won the Climathon Prize, and had support from the University Centre for Entrepreneurship. I also worked at a tech startup while I was living in London.

Thought Saver combines a whole mix of things in my life! My desire to make the world a better place, my curiosity about learning and understanding the self, and my desire to help people live better lives. We are building a smart flashcard app that helps lifelong learners remember valuable ideas and apply them in their life to help people improve their well-being and decision-making.

Can you tell us about Thought Saver’s partnership with SparkW=wave?

Sparkwave is a startup foundry that applies social science, strategic thinking, and iterative experimentation to create socially beneficial software companies from scratch. Everyone works remotely so people are located all over the world.

Thought Saver is currently a team of 3, myself and two developers (David and Leo) and we have early-stage funding from SparkWave so that we can reach product-market fit, then once we are looking to grow (and ideally just before this) we will be looking for angel or VC funding.

How do you think we need to change our approach to social movements, like the climate justice campaign, in order to improve them?

I think using logic, reason, and science to quantify the possible "impact," should be at the centre of decision making. Some decisions will have a 100x greater impact on people's lives than others and that needs to be considered, let’s choose those that require less effort and have the biggest impact!

Secondly, I also think social movements (and society in general) could greatly improve how people communicate with each other. Allowing for more dialogue and empathy for people with completely different views from one another, and a language to talk and communicate with those polarizing views. An example of this is using Non-Violent Communication (NVC), and being aware of one’s own potential cognitive biases. Generally, people act in the ways they do because they have unmet needs. Empathising with those different needs could help people be heard and enable decisions/outcomes to take into consideration the greater good of the world. 

Thank you Flo for your thoughtful and profound contributions… We are so excited to see Thought Saver grow and where you go!