Remember HQ? ‘Quiz Daddy’ Scott Rogowsky is back with TextSavvy, a daily quiz app

Scott Rogowsky is a joke – he knows how to laugh at himself. It ended like that circle around New York City Comic Con and a photo of him posted as a “Wanted” poster, he’s posing himself and asking strangers, “Have you seen this guy?”

The passers-by showed a flicker of awareness, looking for a tall, bearded man like someone they knew in a past life, but finding no place.

“You look familiar! How do I know you?” someone asks, as if Rogowsky could be a friend of a friend he met at a party.

“I know your face,” says another man, staring intently at the 41-year-old.

A cosplayer dressed as a Ghostbuster finally gets it.

“Do you show the game online?” he asks. “Like, every night?”

Rogowsky was laughing to himself, hugging the Internet addict. “I know my place,” he tells TechCrunch. “I don’t walk around like everyone needs to know who I am.”

But seven years ago, everyone did.

Rogowsky was once the face of HQ Trivia, a show that exploded into popular culture, then faded from public view very quickly. Between 2017 and 2019, Rogowsky hosted a mobile game show twice a day. At its peak, it attracted more than 2.4 million daily viewers every night. It got 20 million downloads in its lifetime.

Now the comedian is back with his show called Savvy, which shares much of HQ’s DNA. Savvy’s first game, TextSavvy, is a daily game where players can earn money – only this time, viewers compete against Rogowsky in a puzzle game that’s like a hybrid of The New York Times’ Wordle and Connections, not trivia.

“I believe this is my wonderful calling,” says Rogowsky. “I get in front of the camera, there are thousands of people watching at home – millions, in the HQ days – and they just walk away.”

HQ Trivia was founded by the creators of Vine – the short video platform that predated TikTok – and became a real culture. News of the world way ran the story about office workers dropping everything in the middle of the day playing HQ at 3 pm It was groundbreaking – selected entertainment in a new type of advertising time – until the company faced many problems.

Another founder, Colin Kroll, died of drug addiction; another founder, Rus Yusupov, was a divisive leader who disagreed with his staff. He once threatened the reporter that he would fire Rogowsky if he published an interview with Rogowsky in which he mentioned his preference for Sweetgreen’s salads (Yusupov apparently did not want to advertise the free fast food). Most of all, HQ Trivia fell into the same trap that destroys so many startups. The company released a $15 million round at a cost of $100 million, but it was – in fact – giving money, and it did not create a good plan for making money or creating a sustainable business. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, and his death later became a food interesting drawings and true-crime-neighborhood podcasts contrast how such a promising program failed spectacularly.

This was, understandably, a real pain for Rogowsky. But worse things followed. A baseball fan, Rogowsky left HQ Trivia in 2019 to work daily show on MLB Network. He feels like he made it — he still remembers running into Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez in the bathroom. But his show was canceled when the pandemic shut down baseball. He tried several times over the years to rebuild the company as HQ, but it was a false start.

“It’s crazy – it happened out of my control, and I felt like I was being pushed and set ablaze by this ship in the ocean, just being hit by things that were out of my control, and that’s how I see life,” he says.

He saw himself retiring from the business world and opening a vintage store in California. But he missed the comedy.

He says: “I’ve changed a lot over the past few years. This culminated in a seven-day retreat in the mountains called the “Hoffman Process,” a program he describes as a digital detox combining psychology and neuroscience that helped him “take back control of his life.”

“It gave me enough clarity to say, you know what, I have a lot to do here,” Rogowsky says. “I came out of hiding and I was like, ‘I have something to say. People think I’m funny and interesting. I think I’m funny and interesting.’

People tuned in to HQ Trivia for a cash prize, but the odds of winning were slim. Millions of viewers return nightly for Rogowsky’s wit and charm, earning him a fan following that still calls him “Quiz Daddy.”

“From an emotional point of view, I couldn’t process what was going on,” says Rogowsky, reflecting on his fame. “And in the seven years since then, I have a new perspective… I have my fans, I have my true fans right here. They’ve stayed with me, and it’s a story to hear.”

Rogowsky received many messages over the years from people who wanted to help him build the next HQ. But last year, a direct message on X from European game designer Johan de Jager caught his eye.

“The idea was that the host plays against the audience, so it’s like a two-way interaction,” says Rogowsky. “Imagine HQ if I don’t just ask questions but also answer (them)…

But in the age of AI, where players can easily look up answers, Rogowsky was skeptical that trivia games could work fairly, so Savvy embraced picture words instead.

The most Savvy has paid out for a single game is about $400 – a pittance compared to HQs who are awarded six prizes. That’s because Rogowsky and his co-founders support the company.

“Look, I know it’s not the thousands of dollars that you saw at HQ, it’s the hundreds of thousands that we got to,” Rogowsky said recently. TextSavvy broadcast. “But the difference is that HQ was funded by venture capital. They had $8 million in the bank to start with. They also got $15 million from other businesses.

Rogwosky says he spoke to Savvy’s investors and found some incentives. But venture capital often comes with pressure on startups to raise returns as quickly as possible, the kind that can lead to business failure, as HQ has shown.

“People want 10x and 100x (their money) … I would be very happy to get to profitability, where we can continue to grow the company, continue to hire more people, continue to make more games,” says Rogowsky. “I’m not looking for some kind of eight, nine people. This is what I want to do. I’m going to do this as long as I continue to wake up every morning and say, ‘Goddamn, I’m glad I’m going to get in front of that camera and have fun.’

TextSavvy is currently running “Season 0,” a soft launch that allows the team to work out the kinks before the official launch on March 1. So far, without much promotion, TextSavvy has reached nearly 4,000 viewers overnight.

This is not much compared to the HQ days. Then again, when TechCrunch first wrote about HQthe program had about 3,300 simultaneous viewers. Who’s to say Savvy can’t do it anymore?

“We’re not going anywhere this time,” Rogowsky said. “Nobody’s going to fire me. No drama, no arguments. There won’t be any Savvy posts like there were for HQ.”