I still have no idea why I would need their service. My current financial institutions provide awesome service without cryptic bs. Consumer banking and small business banking is simple to the moderately educated.
I think we're doing some stuff that's pretty different in terms of making your financial data easy to explore and helping you meet savings goals and automatically earn more interest. Those things might not be compelling to everyone, but a lot of people seem interested.
There are some people who do some work to make sure they choose a bank that will not treat them poorly and then continue to do the work to make sure that they don't incur surprise fees or other pitfalls. Those people think their banks are just fine. But, really, why is all that work necessary? The idea behind Simple is to have a company that treats you well by default.
Moderately educated means that a person as spent a few days in their lifetime informing themselves how simple accounting and consumer/small business banking works. It's not rocket science. If you can't read a simple financial or income statement, you can't make an informed decision about a choosing a bank or understand starting a company. Most people do cargo-cult personal finance.
Why should people pay a middle man for good treatment when they can shop around and find a credit union that will do so, sans the vig?
Anyway, in point of fact, most people don't inform themselves of these things, and I don't think those people should be punished for assuming their bank will be trustworthy.