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The longest Tom Cairns ever held a single position was 43 hours. He will not say where. He will say that it rained for the middle eleven, that he could not move to acknowledge it, and that he has never since found waiting for anything difficult.
Cairns, 71, left the army in 2004. Last year he released an app. It now has more than 900,000 downloads, a four-and-a-half star average, and a review section that reads unlike any other in the wellness category.
What the app does
Very little, deliberately.
You open Stillwater and set a duration. The screen goes plain. There is no timer, no countdown, no progress bar, no encouraging message at the halfway point, because there is no visible halfway point. When your time is up, it plays one short tone.
If you leave the app, it stops and says nothing about it. There is no streak. There is no badge. There is nobody to disappoint.
“Every other app in this space is trying to make the waiting more interesting. That is the opposite of the skill. The skill is being fine with it being boring.”
Tom Cairns
Why investors like it
The retention numbers are the story. Users who last more than a fortnight almost never leave, and the average session length has risen every quarter since launch — the inverse of nearly every consumer app ever funded, and the metric that got it into three separate seed rounds.
Stillwater in numbers
- 900,000+ downloads across iOS and Android
- Average session: 34 minutes, and rising
- Features: one
- Notifications sent to date: zero
- Longest recorded single session: 9 hours 12 minutes, by a user in Aberdeenshire waiting for a ferry
The bit he keeps saying in interviews
Cairns is a reluctant founder and an unusually blunt one. Asked what patience actually is, he rejects the framing entirely.
“It is not a virtue, it is a technique. Virtue implies you are being good. I was not being good. I was being still, which is different, and anybody can learn it in about a fortnight if they stop expecting it to feel like anything.”
He has turned down two acquisition offers, one of which wanted to add a leaderboard. He describes the meeting as the shortest of his life.
What is next
Nothing, is the plan. No roadmap, no version two, no premium tier. He has said publicly that a feature request is usually a person asking to be distracted.
He does not, he admits, use a smartphone himself. His daughter installs the updates when she visits, roughly every six weeks. He waits.
