Do you remember HQ? ‘Quiz Daddy’ Scott Rogowsky is back with TextSavvy, the daily mobile game show

Scott Rogowsky is a comedian – he knows how to make fun of himself. That’s how he ended up walking around the New York City Comic Con with his picture printed as a “Wanted” poster, filming himself asking strangers, “Have you seen this man?”

The passers-by blinked, looking at this tall, bearded man as someone they had known in the past, but didn’t know where.

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

“I know your face,” said another person, staring thoughtfully at the 41-year-old man.

A cosplayer dressed as a Ghostbuster finally clears it up.

“Did you used to play that game online?” he asks. “Always, every night?”

Rogowsky was just playing himself, adopting the persona of a washed-up Internet sensation. “I know my place,” he told TechCrunch. “I’m not leaving as everyone should know who I am.”

But seven years ago, everyone did.

Rogowsky was once the face of HQ Trivia, an app that exploded into popular culture, then disappeared from the public eye almost as quickly. Between 2017 and 2019, Rogowsky hosted a live mobile game show twice a day. At its peak, it drew more than 2.4 million daily viewers each night. It has received 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 where players can earn cash — only this time, viewers compete against Rogowsky in a puzzle game that’s like a mix of The New York Times’ Wordle and Connections, instead of trivia.

“I believe this is my calling in a weird way,” Rogowsky said. “I get up there in front of that camera, there are thousands of people watching at home – millions, back in the HQ days – and it just flows.”

HQ Trivia was founded by the creators of Vine – the short video platform that preceded TikTok – and has had a real cultural impact. The national news channels had stories about office workers dropping everything during the day to play HQ at 3 pm It was a sad thing – the entertainment of appointment in the new format of the broadcast era – until the company came in with a lot of negative situations.

One founder, Colin Kroll, died of a drug overdose; another founder, Rus Yusupov, was a divisive leader who clashed with his employees. He once threatened a reporter that he would fire Rogowsky if he published an interview with Rogowsky in which he mentioned his love for Sweetgreen salads (Yusupov apparently did not want to advertise the fast food chain for free). Above all, HQ Trivia fell victim to the same trap that destroys so many startups. The company raised $15 million in funding at a $100 million valuation, but – literally – it’s cashing out, and hasn’t developed a viable monetization plan or a sustainable business model. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, and its subsequent demise was the fodder for dramatic articles and near-criminal podcasts detailing how this promising app failed spectacularly.

This, understandably, was a real blow to Rogowsky. But more bad luck followed. A baseball superfan, Rogowsky left HQ Trivia in 2019 to take a job hosting MLB Network’s daily show. He felt like he was successful – he still lights up when he 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 a company like HQ, but it was a journey of false starts.

“Crazy s–t happens that I’m out of control, and I felt like I was being tossed and lit on this raft in the ocean, just being hit by things that I couldn’t control, and that kind of became my attitude about life in general,” he said.

He found himself retired from show business and opened a vintage shop in California. But he missed the jokes.

“I went through this important transition a few years ago,” he said. That process culminated in a seven-day mountain retreat called the “Hoffman Process,” a program he described as a digital detox that combined studies in psychology and neuroscience that helped him “control [his] health again.”

“It gave me a lot of clarity on what to say, you know, I have a lot to do here,” Rogowsky said. “I came out of that hobby and said, ‘I have something to say. People find me funny and entertaining. I find myself funny and entertaining.’

People opened HQ Trivia in hopes of winning a cash prize, but the odds of winning were slim. Millions of viewers returned night after night for Rogowsky’s wit and charm, earning him a cult following that fans call “Quiz Daddy.”

“Mentally, emotionally, I couldn’t really process what was happening,” Rogowsky said, reflecting on his viral fame. “And in the seven years of humility since then, I have a very new perspective … I have my fans, I have my important fans right here. They’re going with me, and it’s a matter of getting the word out.”

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

“The idea was a game of the host versus the audience, so it’s like a two-way interaction,” Rogowsky said. “Imagine HQ if I didn’t just ask questions but also answered [them]… That adds another layer to it that no one has thought of before.”

But in the age of AI, where players can easily look up answers, Rogowsky was skeptical that a trivia game would work well, so Savvy adopted word puzzles instead.

The most Savvy has paid out for a single game is around $400 – a pittance compared to HQ’s occasional six-figure prize pools. This is because Rogowsky and his co-founders are funding the company themselves.

“Look, I know this isn’t the thousands of dollars you saw at HQ, it’s the hundreds of thousands we ended up with,” Rogowsky said on a recent TextSavvy radio show. “But the difference is that HQ was funded by venture capital. They had $8 million in the bank to start it. They got another $15 million from other venture capitalists. We don’t get that … This is an operashe game that doesn’t matter because I’m paying for it!”

Rogowsky says he talked to investors about Savvy and even got attractive offers. But venture capital often comes with pressure on founders to maximize returns as quickly as possible, a model that can set businesses up for failure, as HQ has shown.

“People want to do 10x and 100x [their investment]… I’d be very happy to get to a point of profitability, where we can continue to grow the company, continue to hire more people, continue to make more games,” Rogowsky said. 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 so excited to get up there 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 technical kinks before the official launch on March 1. So far, without much promotion, TextSavvy has reached about 4,000 viewers in one night.

That’s not much compared to the HQ days. Also, when TechCrunch first wrote about HQ, the app had only about 3,300 concurrent viewers. Who’s to say Savvy can’t do it again?

“We’re not going anywhere on this,” Rogowsky said. “No one is going to fire me. There is no drama, there is no tension. There will be no documentary about Savvy the way there was about HQ.”