The screeching of a smoke detector in the middle of the night could be the most disturbing sound a homeowner has to deal with. Where does that come from? Is there a fire? Did I replace the batteries?
Adam Doppelt experienced that rush-out-of-bed panic so many times over the years that he finally decided to do something about it. The veteran Seattle founder and technology engineer, along with his friend Nathan Kriege, created a resource website for everything you want to know about smoke detectors.
“If I could save one life, it would all be worth it,” Doppelt said, half sarcastically, because what Fireball.xyz mainly does is save a lot of frustration for consumers looking for information about the types of detectors, how they work, why they fail, top-rated models, installation tips and fire safety research. There is also a giant list of smoke detectors pointing out where to buy them on Amazon and elsewhere.
Doppelt, who previously founded startups such as Urbanspoon, Dwellable, Contemporary Chalk and Blueprint AI, had time on his hands. He was between two things (consulting, hiring, maybe about to start something new) and turned to an old list of possible side projects: electric bicycles, artificial intelligence for spreadsheets, smoke detectors.
“It's just interesting stuff,” Doppelt said of the list. “I am an engineer. There is no marketing, there is no CEO. I just work on things that are fun and often useless.”
Smoke detectors set off Doppelt's radar because of the many bad experiences he had with them, not because of house fires, but because things always seem to malfunction and start screaming for unknown reasons at the worst time of the night. . Their children end up crying, the dog ends up barking, and the adults end up exhausted.
According to Doppelt's writings on Fireball, false alarms are the top complaint among consumers in online smoke detector reviews. And those false alarms are dangerous because they encourage people to turn off the detectors rather than deal with the noise and what's causing it. In my own home I have removed the batteries from the detector for this very reason.
“When you read Amazon reviews, false alarms are everywhere,” he said. “You know what you never see on Amazon? “My house burned down.” But you'll see 5,000 reviews and 500 of them will say, 'This won't stop false alarms.'”
Doppelt is proud of the fact that Fireball is a completely human-generated project and that no AI was used to build it, with the exception of some silly illustrations. You also already own the URL because you're sitting on an impressive list of domains you have for sale.
“In terms of the prose I wrote, this information is simply not available online. It’s not easy to find,” Doppelt said. “And then I felt like the AI maybe didn't even know some of these things. If the Web really doesn't know, then I don't think the AI knows.”
He said he and Kriege built Fireball in the same vein of “crawling” as previous startups like Urbanspoon and Dwellable, where they wrote code to “fetch things” and then normalized the data, cleaned it, and presented it. Doppelt's geeky engineering friends are very impressed with an animation at the top of the site showing various things running away from a fireball.
“It doesn't do anything,” Doppelt laughed.
At his Seattle home, Doppelt has become brave enough to replace 10 smoke detectors on his own and shares his DIY Fireball tips. He's interacting on Reddit with people who think Fireball should be the default result when consumers search for information about smoke detectors. And his post about Fireball on LinkedIn has generated comments from a variety of tech experts, including Ascend VC founder Kirby Winfield, who said, “You finally built your Wirecutter!” in reference to the product recommendation of the New York Instances site.
“Over time I realized that by researching my own smoke detector needs, I accidentally became an expert,” Doppelt said. “It's so stupid. The more you investigate, the more interesting it becomes. The rabbit hole goes very deep.”