Scott Rogowsky is a comedian. He knows how to make fun of himself. So he printed his own photo like a ‘Wanted’ poster and went around New York Comic Con, filming himself asking strangers, “Have you seen this guy?”
Passers-by looked at the tall, bearded man, like someone they had known in a past life, with a faint recognition, but they couldn’t place him.
“You look familiar. Where do I know you from?” someone asks, as if Rogowsky could be a friend of a friend he met at a party.
“I know your face.” Another person said, looking at the 41-year-old thoughtfully.
A cosplayer dressed as a Ghostbuster finally found out.
“Did you play that game show online?” he asks. “Every night?”
Rogowsky was making fun of himself by adopting the persona of an old Internet sensation. “I know my place,” he tells TechCrunch. “I’m not going to walk around like everyone knows who I am.”
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But seven years ago, everyone was like that.
Rogowsky was once the face of HQ Trivia, an app that exploded into pop culture and then disappeared from public consciousness almost as quickly. From 2017 to 2019, Rogowsky hosted a live mobile gaming show twice a day. At its peak, it had more than 2.4 million daily viewers every night. It has recorded 20 million downloads in its lifetime.
Now the comedian is back with his own app called Savvy, which shares a lot of HQ’s DNA. Savvy’s first game, TextSavvy, is a daily live game show where players can win cash. Only this time, rather than a quiz, viewers are competing with Rogowsky in a word puzzle game, like a mix of The New York Times’ Wordle and Connections.
“I believe, in a strange way, that this is my calling,” says Rogowsky. “I stood in front of the camera, and there were thousands of people watching from home. In the days at headquarters, it was millions. And it flowed.”
HQ Trivia was founded by the creators of Vine, the short video platform that predated TikTok and became a bona fide cultural sensation. National news channels aired stories about office workers who dropped everything in the middle of the day to play headquarters at 3 p.m. A new form of promising entertainment for the streaming age was groundbreaking until the company got caught up in unfortunate circumstances.
Colin Kroll, one of the founders, died of a drug overdose. Another founder, Rus Yusupov, was a divisive leader and clashed with employees. He once threatened a reporter that he would fire Rogowsky if he mentioned in an interview that he liked Sweetgreen salad (Yusupov clearly didn’t want to give the fast food chain free publicity). Worst of all, HQ Trivia fell victim to the same pitfalls that destroy so many startups. The company raised $15 million in funding at a $100 million valuation, but it was literally giving away money and failed to develop a meaningful plan to generate revenue or build a sustainable business model. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, and its subsequent downfall has become fodder for dramatic documentaries and true-crime-adjacent podcasts analyzing how such a promising app failed so spectacularly.
Naturally, this was a huge blow to Rogowsky. But more misfortune followed. Rogowsky, a baseball fanatic, left HQ Trivia in 2019 to host a daily MLB Network show. He felt like he had finally done it. He still glowers as he recalls running into Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez in the bathroom. But his show was canceled when baseball was shut down due to the pandemic. He has tried several times over the years to reinvent a company like HQ, but it has been a journey of false starts.
“Something crazy happened that I couldn’t control, and I felt like I was thrown on this raft in the ocean, battered by things I couldn’t control. That was my attitude toward life in general,” he says.
He thought he had retired from show business and opened a vintage store in California. But he missed comedy.
“I have gone through a very significant personal transformation over the past few years,” he said. The process culminated in a seven-day mountain retreat called the “Hoffmann Process.” It’s a program he describes as a digital detox that combines lessons from psychology and neuroscience that helped him “take back control of (his) life.”
“It gave me a lot of clarity that there was more work to be done here,” Rogowsky said. “I came out of the retreat saying, ‘I have something to tell you. People think I’m fun and funny. I think I’m fun and funny, too.’”
People watched HQ Trivia for the prospect of winning a prize, but the odds of winning were slim. Rogowsky’s quick wit and charm brought millions of viewers back every night, which earned him a following of fans who still call him “Quiz Dad.”
“I couldn’t really process what was happening on a psychological and emotional level,” Rogowsky said, reflecting on his viral fame. “And in the seven years since, I’ve gained a whole new perspective… My fan base and core followers are right here. They’re with me, and it’s important to let them know.”
Rogowsky has received many messages over the years from people wanting to help build the next headquarters. But last year, a direct message about X from European game designer Johan de Jager caught his attention.
“The idea was that the host would play to the audience, so it was like a two-way interaction,” Rogowsky said. “Imagine HQ if I wasn’t just asking questions, I was also answering them… It adds another layer that no one had thought of before.”
But in an age of AI where players can easily find answers, Rogowsky was skeptical that trivia games could work fairly, so Savvy adopted word puzzles instead.
The most Savvy has paid in a single game is about $400. This is a small amount compared to the six-figure prize pools that HQ sometimes pays out. That’s because Rogowsky and his co-founders are directly funding the company.
“We know that these are not the thousands of dollars we saw at headquarters, but the hundreds of thousands of dollars we end up with,” Rogowsky said during a recent TextSavvy broadcast. “But the difference is that the headquarters was funded by venture capitalists. We had $8 million in the bank to start. They got another $15 million from other venture capitalists. We didn’t get that… This is a low-budget opera because I’m paying for it!”
Rogowsky said he has been talking to investors about Savvy and has even received some attractive offers. But venture backing often comes with pressure on founders to maximize profits as quickly as possible, a model that can set a business up for failure, as HQ has demonstrated.
“People want 10x, 100x (their investment)… I’m very excited to get to a point of profitability where I can continue to grow the company, hire more people, and continue to make more games,” says Rogowsky. “I’m not looking for an eight-figure, nine-figure exit or anything like that. This is what I want to do. I’m going to do this as long as I keep waking up every morning and saying, ‘Damn, I’m excited to get in front of that camera and have fun.'”
TextSavvy is currently undergoing ‘Season 0’, a soft launch that allows the team to work out technical issues ahead of the official launch on March 1st. So far, without much promotion, TextSavvy has reached about 4,000 viewers per night.
Compared to the days at headquarters, it’s not that much. And when TechCrunch first wrote about HQ, the app only had about 3,300 concurrent viewers. Who’s to say Savvy can’t do it again?
“We’re not going anywhere this time,” Rogowsky said. “No one is going to fire me. There is no drama, there is no suspense. There will be no documentary about Savvy like there is about HQ.”
