Watch Duty topped the Apple App Store charts on Wednesday, racking up nearly half a million downloads in just one day as three brutal wildfires raged through Southern California, killing at least five human and forced thousands to evacuate. The app provides users with the latest alerts about fires in their area and has become an essential service for millions of users in the western US who struggle with the seemingly constant threat of deadly wildfires—a major reason why there it more than 360,000 unique visits from 8:00- 8:30 am local time Wednesday. And the man behind Watch Duty promises that as a nonprofit, his organization has no plans pull an OpenAI and become a profit-seeking business.
Watch Duty was created in 2021 by John Mills, the founder and CEO, who was inspired to develop the app after experiencing terrifying 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 most up-to-date information. Mills evacuated his property during the Walbridge Fire in 2020 and decided he needed to take action.
“I spent day and night for eight days all night listening to radios, digging on the internet, and I realized this was a broken, broken problem,” Mills said. “And many of the people who survived me in that fire are now employees of my company.”
Mills said those people guided him through his issues and it took him about six months to realize that the same people who helped him were the key to this problem—because Watch Duty is not just a person who codes an app, although Mills did it himself. It's a group of people who actually make something that works. Watch Duty covers 22 states and has 15 full-time staff, seven of whom are reporters who provide updates on the app, and dozens of volunteers.
“Surprisingly, it only took us about 80 days to get it [Watch Duty] off the ground,” says Mills, noting that it's a relatively lightweight app. “The key is really the reporters themselves, the radio operators, right?”
Mills said he just had to explain to people who might work on the app that he's not “some Silicon Valley tech bro trying to cash in on the disaster,” but just a guy who's concerned about protecting his own property during the weather. of wildfire and thought about it. may be useful to others. They launched in 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 to engineer, but as I got older, you realized, if you build it, they won't come, right?” Mills said. “Like why did you build this? Why is it important, right? How do you bring it to market? How can you actually use the technology to make a difference in the world?”
That's when it clicked for Mills. He told Gizmodo it's about getting emergency radio monitors with the latest information and pushing what they know into an app as reporters.
The organization is established as a non-profit 501(c)(3) and strives to be transparent about its finances and work in the public interest. The app is free but users can subscribe for additional features that are neat, though not essential to keeping people safe, such as information on where air tankers may be flying at any given moment.
Watch Duty brought in $2 million in revenue last year from 65,500 paying members, an additional $600,000 from individual donors, and a $2 million grant from Google. The organization also received a $1 million grant from a wealthy businessman who chose to remain anonymous, Mills told Gizmodo. The Watch Duty website includes a 2024 annual report which breaks down where its money goes and what goals the organization has for 2025.
“We're trying to find a way to make a sustainable nonprofit that supports the free version without having to do this horrible idea like fundraising in December because you don't do your budget in January, and throw a lot of wandering and ask people for money,” Mills said.
In 2012 Mills was founded Zenputa tech platform used by restaurants for inventory and scheduling, and sold the company in 2022. His father was both a cabinet maker and an executive at IBM, which is one reason he has been working with computers since he was a child .
“I grew up in a wood shop with a computer, right? So I've been writing code since I was eight. Before that, I grew up working with my hands. And so a lot of my life has been in technology,” Mills said. At age eight, he was too young to work with the power tools his father used to make cabinets, so he “used the computer and started -hack.”
Mills understands the weight of his creation and the valuable resource it can be in life-threatening situations. “When Watch Duty goes out of your pocket, it's because something bad is going on,” says Mills.
The app has received recognition both locally in California and nationally, with an invitation to an 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, correct?” Mills said. “We knew from the beginning that it was about geospatial problems. If people have to migrate, that's the business we want to get into.”
Mills promises that his nonprofit has no plans to switch from a non-profit model to something more profitable, as OpenAI recently did in a move that raised more than a few eyebrows.
“Unlike OpenAI, we're not changing. We're not for sale. That's nonsense behavior,” Mills said, describing OpenAI's secretive corporate structure. “There is no shell company. There is no other owner or anything under the corporation that is intentional.”
