Early in 2014, Simple was a mid-stage startup with only a single analytics-focused employee. When we wanted to answer a question about customer behavior or business performance, we would have to query production databases. Everybody in the company wanted to make informed decisions, from engineering to product strategy to business development...

Simple has adopted Amazon Redshift as a data warehouse. It’s used not just by our data analysts, but by teams throughout the company to answer questions about fraud, customer behavior, and more. Simple’s Analytics Infrastructure A year ago, many business intelligence questions at Simple could only be answered via direct access to production databases. Aside...

Open source software is a part of our DNA here at Simple. Our product is realized because we stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us. As an organization we believe it’s vital to not just be a consumer of the open source communities’ work, but also to be active contributors to it. In our iOS app we use AFNetworking and were able to help develop...

At Simple, we take great care to ensure our infrastructure is easy to understand. This is so important to us that, over the past few months, we rebuilt the entire system from the ground up in order to simplify it. In this post, I’ll explain why we did such a crazy thing, and how we did it. Too Many Moving Pieces Simple operates a service-oriented...

At Simple, we acknowledge that it’s our responsibility to be prudent about the extent to which we talk about how we ensure our customers’ safety. But there are many components of our business that are not appreciably strengthened by secrecy; obscurity is not a critically important part of our security program. In keeping with our core cultural commitment...

Recently we released version 1.1 of Simple for Android. New in this release is the Send Money feature, which lets our customers schedule a payment in the form of a paper check. Our Web and iOS clients have had this feature for some time, so they paved the way in terms of hashing out the user experience and making the scheduling process easy to understand. But...