Watch Duty shot to the top of the Apple App Store charts on Wednesday, racking up nearly half a million downloads in just one day as three ferocious wildfires tore through Southern California, killing at least five people and forcing thousands to evacuate. The app provides users with up-to-date warnings about fires in their area and has become an essential service for millions of users in the western US battling the seemingly constant threat of deadly wildfires—a big reason it had more than 360,000 unique visits from 8:00- 8:30 am local time on Wednesday. And the man behind Watch Duty promises that as a non-profit organization, his organization has no plans to pull OpenAI and become a for-profit business.
Watch Duty was created in 2021 by John Mills, founder and CEO, who was inspired to create the app after experiencing devastating wildfires in 2019 and 2020 near his home in Sonoma County, California. Mills, a tech entrepreneur who sold his company Zenput a few years ago, said he couldn’t find the information he needed online and did extensive research on who would have the latest information. Mills moved his belongings during the Walbridge Fire in 2020 and decided he had to take action.
“I spent eight days and nights listening to the radio, digging around on the Internet, and I realized that this is a broken, broken problem,” Mills said. “And many of the people who brought me into that fire are now employees of my company.”
Mills said that those people directed him to his issues and it took him another six months before he realized that the same people who helped him were the keys to this problem—because Watch Duty is not just one guy who wrote an operating system, although Mills. he did that himself. It’s the team of people that actually make the thing work. Watch Duty covers 22 states and has 15 full-time employees, seven of whom are journalists who provide updates through the app, and dozens of volunteers.
“The amazing thing is that it only took us about 80 days to find out [Watch Duty] down,” said Mills, noting that it’s a nice lightweight app. “The key was the journalists themselves, the radio operators, right?”
Mills said he just needed to explain to potential app developers that he wasn’t “some tech bro from Silicon Valley trying to profit from a disaster,” but he was just someone who was concerned about protecting his property during a wildfire and thought so. it may be helpful to others. They launched in just three California counties in August 2021 but gained 50,000 users in just a few weeks. Last year, Watch Duty had 7.2 million users, up from 1.9 million the year before.
“Engineering taught me engineering, but when I grew up, you realize that, if you build, they won’t come, right?” Mills said. “Like what do you build with? Why is this important, right? How do you find this in the market? How do you really use technology to make a difference in the world?”
That’s where Mills clicked. He told Gizmodo that it’s all about getting emergency radio operators up-to-date and pushing what they know into the app as journalists.
The organization was established as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and strives to be transparent about its finances and work for the benefit of the community. The app is free but users can sign up for additional features that are neat, though not essential to keeping people safe, like information on where air tanks are flying at any given time.
Watch Duty brought in $2 million last year from 65,500 paying members, another $600,000 from individual donors, and a $2 million grant from Google. The organization also received $1 million in funding from a wealthy businessman who chose to remain anonymous, Mills tells Gizmodo. The Watch Duty website includes a 2024 annual report that explains where your money is going and what the organization’s goals are for 2025.
“We’re trying to figure out a way to make a sustainable nonprofit that supports the free version without doing this bad idea of fundraising in December because you’re not going to make your budget in January, and throw a bunch of galas. and begging people for money,” said Mills.
In 2012 Mills founded Zenput, a technology platform used by restaurants to integrate and plan, and sold the company in 2022. His father was a cabinet maker and an executive at IBM, which is one of the reasons he worked with computers from an early age.
“I grew up in a woodworking shop with a computer, didn’t I? So I’ve been coding since I was eight years old. Before that, I grew up working with my hands. So most of my life has been in technology,” said Mills. When he was eight, he was too young to work with the power tools his father used to make cabinets, so he would “get on the computer and start hacking.”
Mills understands the complexity of what he has created and the valuable tool it can be in life-threatening situations. “When Watch Duty goes into your pocket, it’s because something bad is going on,” said Mills.
The application received recognition both locally in California and nationally, with an invitation to the Innovation Roundtable at the White House back in October 2024. The organization is looking to expand to other states and cover other types of natural disasters such as floods.
“We call this company Watch Duty, not Fire Duty on purpose, right?” Mills said. “We knew from the beginning that there were geospatial problems. If people have to move, that’s the business we want to be in.”
Mills promises that his nonprofit has no plans to transition from a non-profit model to something more for-profit, as OpenAI recently made a move that raised a few eyebrows.
“Unlike OpenAI, we don’t change. We are not for sale. That’s absurd behavior,” Mills said, explaining OpenAI’s deceptive business structure. “There are no shell companies. No one else owns anything under the organization on purpose. “