Scott Rogowsky is a comedian – he knows how to laugh. That’s how it ended roaming New York City Comic Con with his own photo printed like a “Wanted” poster, filming himself asking a stranger, “Do you see this guy?”
These passers-by showed flashes of recognition, seeing a tall, bearded man who looked like someone they had known in a past life, but couldn’t place.
“You look familiar! Where do I know you from?” someone asked, as if Rogowsky could be a friend of a friend he met at a party.
“I know your face,” said another, carefully addressing the 41-year-old.
A cosplayer wearing a Ghostbuster finally found out.
“Have you ever done an online game show?” he asked. “Like, every night?”
Rogowsky is just enjoying himself, embracing the persona of a washed-up internet sensation. “I know my place,” he told TechCrunch. “I don’t walk around like everyone knows who I am.”
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But seven years ago, everyone did.
Rogowsky was once the face of HQ Trivia, the app that exploded into popular culture, then faded from public consciousness just as quickly. Between 2017 and 2019, Rogowsky hosted a live mobile game show twice a day. At its peak, it attracted more than 2.4 million viewers every night. It got 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, it’s a daily live game show where players can earn cash – only this time, viewers compete against Rogowsky in a word puzzle game that’s like a hybrid of the New York Times’ Wordle and Connection, instead of trivia.
“I believe it’s my calling in a weird way,” Rogowsky said. “I got up in front of that camera, there were thousands of people watching at home – millions, back in the HQ days – and it just flowed.”
HQ Trivia was founded by the creators of Vine – the short video platform that preceded TikTok – and became a genuine cultural sensation. National news channel run the story about office workers drop everything in the middle of the day to play HQ at 3 pm It breakthrough – appointment entertainment in a new format for the streaming era – until the company imploded in a barrage of unfortunate circumstances.
One of the founders, Colin Kroll, died of a drug overdose; Another founder, Rus Yusupov, was a divisive leader who clashed with the staff. He was once threatening journalists that he would fire Rogowsky if he published an interview with Rogowsky in which he mentioned liking Sweetgreen salad (Yusupov apparently didn’t want to give the fast food chain free publicity). Most importantly, HQ Trivia falls victim to the same pitfalls that destroy so many startups. The company has raised a $15 million funding round in the value of $ 100 million, but – quite literally – give money, and never developed a useful plan to monetize or build a sustainable business model. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, with deaths following dramatic documentary and true-crime podcast dissecting how such a promising app failed so spectacularly.
This, understandably, was a real blow to Rogowsky. But more bad luck followed. A baseball superfan, Rogowsky left HQ Trivia in 2019 for a hosting job MLB Network show every day. He felt like he finally made it – he still remembers walking into Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez in the bathroom. But the show was canceled when the pandemic shut down baseball. He tried several times over the years to create a company like HQ, but it was a false journey.
“Crazy things happen that I can’t control, and I feel like I’m being thrown around and turned on this raft in the ocean, just getting hit by things that I can’t control, and that’s my attitude about life in general,” he said.
He considered himself retired from show business and opened a vintage shop in California. But he missed the comedy.
“I’ve gone through a very significant personal transformation over the past few years,” 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 lessons in psychology and neuroscience that helped him “take back control of his life.”
“It gave me the clarity that I was saying, you know, I’ve got more to do here,” Rogowsky said. “I came out of that retreat and was like, ‘I have something to say. People think I’m funny and fun. I think I’m funny and fun.'”
People tune in to HQ Trivia for the prospect of winning cash prizes, but the odds of winning are slim. Millions of viewers return nightly for Rogowsky’s wit and charm, which has earned him a cult following of fans who still call him “Quiz Daddy.”
“From a psychological, emotional side, I couldn’t process what happened,” Rogowsky said, reflecting on the viral notoriety. “And in the last seven years, I’ve had a whole new perspective… I have a fan base, I have a core following here. They’re with me, and it’s a problem to get the word out.”
Rogowsky has received many messages over the years from people wanting to help him build his next HQ. But last year, X’s direct message from European game designer Johan de Jager caught the attention.
“The idea is that the host is playing against the audience, so it’s like a two-way interaction,” Rogowsky said. “Imagine HQ that I not only ask but also answer (them) … That adds another layer that no one thought of before.”
But in an age of AI, where players can easily find answers, Rogowsky was skeptical that trivia games could do justice, so Savvy opted for word puzzles.
The most that Savvy has paid out in a single game is around $400 – small compared to HQ’s occasional six-figure prize pools. That’s because Rogowsky and his co-founders funded the company themselves.
“Look, I know it’s not the thousands of dollars that you see at HQ, it’s the hundreds of thousands that you end up getting,” Rogowsky said in one TextSavvy Broadcast. “But the difference is that HQ is financed by venture capital. They had $8 million in the bank to start. They got another $15 million from other venture capitalists. We didn’t get it… It’s a cheap operashe because I paid!”
Rogwosky said he’s talked to investors about Savvy and even got an interesting offer. But ventures often come with pressure on the founders to maximize returns as quickly as possible, a model that can set the business up to failure, as HQ shows.
“People want 10x and 100x (investment) … I’m excited to get to the point of profitability, where we can continue to grow the company, continue to hire more people, continue to make more games,” Rogowsky said. “I’m not looking for some kind of eight figures, nine figures out. This is what I want. I’m going to do this as long as I continue to wake up every morning and say, ‘Oh my God, I’m so excited 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 technical kinks before the official launch on March 1. So far, without much promotion, TextSavvy has peaked at around 4,000 viewers a night.
It’s not much compared to HQ days. Then again, when TechCrunch first wrote about HQthe app only has about 3,300 concurrent viewers. Who says Savvy can’t do it anymore?
“We are not going anywhere this time,” said Rogowsky. “No one fired me. No drama, no tension. There’s never going to be a documentary about Savvy like the one at HQ.”