Chirping smoke detectors light a fire in startup founder to build ultimate online guide to the devices

The middle-of-the-night chirp from a smoke detector might be the most unsettling sound a homeowner has to deal with. Where’s that coming from? Is there a fire? Did I replace the batteries?

Adam Doppelt experienced that bolt-from-bed panic enough times over the years that he finally decided to do something about it. The longtime Seattle tech founder and engineer, along with buddy Nathan Kriege, built a resource website for everything you’d ever want to know about smoke detectors.

“If I could just save one life, it will all be worth it,” Doppelt said, half sarcastically, because what Fireball.xyz mainly does is save a lot of frustration for consumers seeking information on types of detectors, how they work, why they fail, the highest-rated models, install tips, and fire safety research. There’s also a giant list of smoke detectors pointing to where to buy them on Amazon and elsewhere.

Doppelt, who previously founded startups including Urbanspoon, Dwellable, Fresh Chalk and Blueprint AI, had time on his hands. He was between things — consulting, contracting, maybe about to start something new — and he turned to an old list of potential side projects: e-bikes, AI for spreadsheets, smoke detectors.

“It’s just things that are interesting,” Doppelt said of the list. “I’m an engineer. There’s no marketing, there’s no CEO. I’m just working on things that are fun and often pointless.”

Smoke detectors tripped Doppelt’s radar because of the many bad experiences he’s had with them — not because of house fires, but because the things always seem to malfunction and start shrieking for unknown reasons at the worst time of the night. His kids 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 chief complaint among consumers in online reviews for smoke detectors. And those false alarms are dangerous because they encourage people to disconnect detectors rather than deal with the noise and what’s causing it. In my own house, I have removed detector batteries for this very reason.

“When you read the Amazon reviews, false alarms swamp everything,” he said. “You know what you never see on Amazon? ‘My house burned down.’ But you will see 5,000 reviews and 500 of them saying, ‘This thing won’t stop false alarming.'”

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. He also already owned the URL because he’s sitting on an impressive list of domains that he has for sale.

“In terms of the prose that I wrote, this information is just kind of not available online. It’s not easy to find,” Doppelt said. “And so I felt like AI may not even know some of this stuff. If the internet doesn’t really know it, then I don’t think AI knows it.”

He said he and Kriege built Fireball in the same “crawling” vein as previous startups such as Urbanspoon and Dwellable, where they wrote code to “go and fetch things” and then normalized the data, cleaned it up and presented it. Doppelt’s geeky engineer friends are most impressed by an animation at the top of the site that shows various things running away from a fireball.

“It doesn’t do anything,” Doppelt laughed.

In his house in Seattle, Doppelt has gotten brave enough to replace 10 smoke detectors on his own, and he shares his DIY tips on Fireball. He’s engaged on Reddit with people who think Fireball should be the default result when consumers go looking for smoke detector information. And his post about Fireball on LinkedIn has drawn comments from a variety of techies, including Ascend VC founder Kirby Winfield, who said, “You finally built your Wirecutter!” in reference to The New York Times product recommendation site.

“I realized over time that in researching my own smoke detector needs I actually accidentally became an expert,” Doppelt said. “It’s so dorky. The more you dig the more interesting it gets. The rabbit hole is super deep.”