Draper, Utah, February 6, 2025
34-year-old Josh Daniels has always been interested in finance and entrepreneurial ventures.
“Since I was little I’ve loved finance. When we went to visit my family in Japan, I wanted to know why the dollar was worth more than the yen. For one dollar I could buy fireworks and candy at the store in Japan, but one dollar here only got me two candy bars. I was blown away. I sold candy as a kid, I started little businesses, swimming lesson businesses, I’ve always been intrigued with how business and money works. As I got older, I kept noticing these patterns proving money is just a tool. It’s a trade for experience.”
His newest venture, Smpl, aims to provide personalized financial planning through AI, targeting the 70% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck.
We sat down with Daniels to learn about the career journey that led to the creation of Smpl. Daniels dropped out of college at Utah Valley University to pursue an early career in business. “I probably could have graduated, but school just wasn’t for me. My wife told me I should probably choose to be in school or not, because I’d be hanging out with her while I was supposed to be in class.”
Daniels joined the partnerships team at Divvy in 2020. He described how he got involved with Divvy from the advice of two good friends, Robert Henderson and Bert Curtis, who for months persuaded him to join this rocket ship rise of Divvy in its early years. At the time, Daniels working at Skipio, doing partnerships and channel sales.
“A good friend there, Jake Bryant, gave me advice that stuck with me—always have an “expiration date” to check in with yourself and make sure you’re still learning and growing in the way you need to,” recounted Daniels.
“By late 2019, I hit that expiration date and realized it was time to move on to the next challenge that would help me develop the skills I’d eventually need to run my own company. Robert and Bert finally got me to interview at Divvy, where I met with Melissa Lane, Jon Stoddard, Woody Klemetson, and a bunch of the team. At first, the role got filled, but the next month, I had breakfast with Melissa again, and she offered me the SAE role. Six months later, I transitioned into partnerships.”
Daniels described that Divvy was like a masterclass in execution. “Every day felt like a rocket ship taking off. The team was insanely talented, we moved fast, and we had a ton of fun doing it. But most importantly, I learned three key lessons that shaped how I think about building a company:
- Sell → Design → Build – Make sure people want what you’re building before you actually build it. If you can sell it first, you know you’re on the right track.
- Fail Fast, Fail Forward – The faster you iterate, the faster you find product-market fit. Failure isn’t the enemy—stagnation is.
- Focus, Alignment, Communication, Execution – Success comes from aligning the right people around the right vision and moving fast with clear communication
Before his time at Divvy, Daniels actually tried starting Smpl back in 2015 when he was a financial advisor at Northwestern Mutual. “I saw firsthand how people struggled with budgeting, debt, and financial behaviors that kept getting in their way. I wanted to build a tool that could act as a financial advisor in your pocket, but I quickly realized the technology just wasn’t there yet. That experience planted the seed, but Divvy is where I learned the execution side of things—the frameworks, the speed, the importance of a great team—that ultimately made Smpl possible.”
He continued:
“After leaving Divvy, I started a company focused on building a Venmo for international payments, built on our own blockchain for individuals and businesses in underserved regions with high immigration to the U.S. There was massive demand—people still ask me if they can use it today—but regulatory and compliance challenges made it difficult to scale. That experience reinforced what I had already learned: a great idea isn’t enough. The right team, alignment, and execution matter more than anything. These experiences—Divvy, my early attempt at Smpl, my time at Skipio, and building an international payments platform—all shaped how I’m building Smpl today. The problems I saw in 2015 still exist, but now, with the right technology and the right execution, I know we can solve them.”
Daniels got into financial planning because he saw it as the way to help the most people. “As I met with tons and tons of people, rich, poor, middle class, I found that most people hadn’t learned the rules of finance. And it’s not their fault or my fault. I grew up in a middle class family and then poor for a while, like, really poor. I helped pay bills when I was a young kid. I worked a paper out in the morning before school. I was a school janitor after school, and then I did soccer and stuff. I learned real quickly that this is just a trade, this thing, money.”
“I kept seeing there were three common barriers to getting started financially: how do I build a budget that actually will be right, how do I manage my finances, and how do I align that with how life actually works?” Smpl, the AI financial planner, does all three from your pocket.
With recent developments of artificial intelligence, Daniels’ dream of providing a personal financial advisor in every person’s pocket had become operational. With Smpl, Daniels has seized the opportunity, and he aims to fill the gap in financial planning services for those who need it most—those living paycheck to paycheck.
“We’re already live. We built it in a month. We’ve built out what we call the fundamental five: income, expenses, savings, debt, investments. Right now we are building out an AI financial planner that’ll take your data and then recommend those financial strategies that will be able to help you with cash flow planning. We already have users, our next milestone is 10,000 users and to have the AI financial planner built within the next three months. We are going to be connecting our whole platform to a banking system, so we’ll offer a debit and credit card.”
“Everything in one place, that’s the goal.”
With its headquarters in Draper, Smpl is positioning itself as “a life company that is focused on teaching basic financial principles to align behaviors with values, goals, and priorities,” according to Daniels.
He continued:
“We’ll be the best budgeting app out there, but it’s because we’re getting to the root of what all of these things actually matter. It’s the alignment of behaviors with values, goals and priorities. That’s our focus. That’s why we’re a life company, a life management company, not just a budget.”
Smpl has attracted global interest with their beta product and adopted the slogan, “live simple.”
“The principles are the same, whether you live in India or the United States, you want to become and you want to live simple. That’s what “live simple” means: to become. The way you do that is through the alignment of these behaviors with your goals, values and priorities.”
“I’m a Japanese/Jew with family from Hawaii and Japan. I’m colorblind and I love life and hiking, snowboarding, photography, soccer, golf, food, people, and more food.” said Daniels.
“My calling in life that I’ve come to learn is helping other people achieve their goals and live their dreams. It’s like a drug for me. Smpl is just like a way for me to literally do that for millions, if not billions of people. At the end of the day, it’s always about people—aligning them, empowering them, and helping them become their best selves. That’s how I try to live my life, and it’s exactly how we’re building Smpl.”
The beta version of smpl is live now.
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