Watch Duty shot to the top of the Apple App Store charts on Wednesday, racking up roughly half a million downloads in just a day as three brutal wildfires raged through Southern California, killing at least five people and forcing thousands to evacuate. The app gives users the latest alerts about fires in their area and has become a vital service for millions of users in the western U.S. struggling with the seemingly constant threat of deadly wildfires—one major reason it had over 360,000 unique visits from 8:00-8:30 a.m. local time Wednesday. And the man behind Watch Duty promises that as a nonprofit, his organization has no plans to pull an OpenAI and become a profit-seeking enterprise.
Watch Duty was created in 2021 by John Mills, the founder and CEO, who was inspired to build an app after experiencing frightening 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 was doing extensive research on who would have the most up-to-date info. 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 just up all night listening to radios, digging through the internet, and just realized this was a broken, broken problem,” Mills said. “And a lot of the people who got me through that fire are actually now employees of my company.”
Mills said those people guided him through his issues and it took him about six more months before he realized that the same people who helped him were the key to this problem—because Watch Duty isn’t just one guy who coded an app, though Mills did that himself. It’s a team of people who actually make the thing work. Watch Duty covers 22 states and has 15 full-time staff, seven of them reporters who provide updates on the app, and dozens of volunteers.
“Surprisingly, it only took us about 80 days to get [Watch Duty] off the ground,” said Mills, noting that it’s a pretty lightweight app. “The key was really the reporters themselves, the radio operators, right?”
Mills said he just needed to explain to people who might work on the app that he wasn’t “some Silicon Valley tech bro trying to profit off disaster,” but just a guy who was concerned about protecting his own property during wildfires and thought it could be useful to others. They launched in just three California counties in August 2021 but gained 50,000 users in the span of just a couple of weeks. Last year, Watch Duty had 7.2 million users, up from 1.9 million the year earlier.
“Engineering taught me to engineer, but then as I got older, you realize that like, if you build it, they won’t come, right?” Mills said. “Like why are you building it? Why does this matter, right? How do you get this to market? How do you really leverage technology to be able to make a difference in the world?”
That’s when it clicked for Mills. He told Gizmodo it was all about getting emergency radio monitors who had the latest information and pushing what they knew onto an app as reporters.
The organization was founded 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 vital to keeping people safe, like 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 businessperson who has opted to remain anonymous, Mills tells Gizmodo. Watch Duty’s website includes a 2024 annual report that 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 of like fundraising in December because you’re not going to make your budget in January, and throw a bunch of galas and beg people for money,” said Mills.
In 2012 Mills founded Zenput, a 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 with IBM, which is one reason he’s been working with computers since he was a young kid.
“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,” said Mills. At eight, he was too young to work with the power tools his dad used for cabinet-making, so he would “go use the computer and start hacking.”
Mills understands the gravity of what he’s created and the vital resource it can be in life-threatening situations. “When Watch Duty goes off in your pocket, it’s because something bad’s happening,” said 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 into other states and cover other types of natural disasters like floods.
“We call this company Watch Duty, not Fire Duty on purpose, right?” Mills said. “We knew from the beginning it was about geospatial problems. If people have to migrate, that’s the business we want to be in.”
Mills promises that his nonprofit has no plans to shift from a non-profit model to something more profitable, like 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 the sneaky corporate structure of OpenAI. “There’s no shell companies. There’s no other owner or anything up underneath the corporation on purpose.”
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