Scott Rogowsky is a comedian — he knows how to poke fun at himself. That’s how it ended up roaming New York Comic Con with his own photo printed as a “Wanted” poster, filming himself asking strangers, “Have you seen this man?”
These bystanders showed a flicker of recognition, looking at the tall, bearded man like someone they knew in a past life, but couldn’t quite place.
“You look familiar! How do I know you?” someone asks, as if Rogowsky could be a friend of a friend they’d met at a party.
“I know your face,” says another person, looking thoughtfully at the 41-year-old.
A cosplayer dressed as a Ghostbuster finally figures it out.
“You used to play this game online?” he asks. “Like every night?”
Rogowski was just kidding himself by embracing the persona of a shabby Internet sensation. “I know my place,” he tells TechCrunch. “I don’t walk around like everyone is supposed to know who I am.”
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But seven years ago, everyone did.
Rogowsky was once the face of HQ Trivia, an app that exploded into popular culture and then disappeared from public consciousness almost as quickly. Between 2017 and 2019, Rogowsky hosted the mobile gaming live show twice a day. At its peak, it attracted more than 2.4 million viewers every day every night. It has amassed 20 million lifetime downloads.
Now the comedian is back with an app of his own called Savvy, which shares much of HQ’s DNA. Savvy’s first game, TextSavvy, is a daily live game show where players can win cash — only this time, viewers compete against Rogowsky in a word puzzle game that’s something of a hybrid of Wordle and the New York Times’ Connections, and not trivia.
“I think this is my calling in a weird way,” Rogowsky says. “I get 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 predates TikTok – and has become a bona fide cultural sensation. National news channels ran stories about office workers dropping everything in the middle of the day to play HQ at 3pm. It was groundbreaking — dating entertainment in a new format for the streaming age — until the company collapsed in a barrage of unfortunate circumstances.
One founder, Colin Kroll, died of a drug overdose. the other founder, Rus Yusupov, was a divisive leader who clashed with his staff. He once threatened a journalist that he would fire Rogowsky if he published an interview with Rogowsky in which he mentioned that he likes Sweetgreen salads (Yusupov apparently did not want to give free publicity to the fast-food chain). Above all, HQ Trivia fell victim to the same trap that dooms so many startups. The company had raised a $15 million funding round at a $100 million valuation, but – literally – gave away money and never developed a meaningful plan to generate revenue or create a sustainable business model. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, with its demise later becoming fodder for dramatic documentaries and true crime podcasts analyzing how such a promising application failed so spectacularly.
This was, understandably, a real blow to Rogowsky. But more misfortunes followed. A baseball superfan, Rogowsky had left HQ Trivia in 2019 for a hosting job a daily MLB Network show. He felt like he finally made it — he still lights up remembering running into Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez in the bathroom. But his show was canceled when the pandemic shut down baseball. He tried many times over the years to recreate a company like HQ, but it was a journey of false starts.
“It was crazy that I had no control and I felt like I was being tossed and turned on this raft in the ocean, just getting hit by things that I can’t control, and that was kind of my attitude about life in general,” he says.
He considered himself retired from entertainment and opened a vintage store in California. But he lacked comedy.
“I’ve gone through this very significant personal transformation over the last couple of years,” he said. That process culminated in a seven-day mountain retreat called “The Hoffman Process,” a program he describes as a digital detox that combines psychology and neuroscience courses that helped him “take control of [his] life again.”
“It gave me a lot of clarity to say, you know what, I have more to do here,” Rogowsky says. “I came out of that shelter and said, ‘I have something to say. People find me funny and entertaining. I find myself funny and entertaining.”
People tuned in to HQ Trivia for the prospect of winning a cash prize, but the odds of winning were slim. Rogowsky’s quick wit and charm kept millions of viewers coming back nightly, earning him a cult following that still calls him “Quiz Daddy.”
“On the psychological, emotional side, I couldn’t really process what was happening,” says Rogowsky, reflecting on his fame from the virus. “And in the seven humble years since then, I’ve got a very new perspective… I’ve got my fans, I’ve got my core fans here. They’re with me and it’s just a matter of getting the word out.”
Rogowsky has received many messages over the years from people wanting 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 that the host is playing against the audience, so it’s like a two-way interaction,” says Rogowsky. “Imagine HQ if I didn’t just ask the questions but also answered them [them]… This adds another layer to it that no one had thought of before.”
But in the age of artificial intelligence, where players can easily look up answers, Rogowsky was skeptical that a trivia game could do justice, so Savvy embraced word puzzles instead.
The most Savvy has paid out in a single game is around $400 — small compared to HQ’s occasional six-figure prizes. That’s because Rogowsky and his co-founders are funding the company themselves.
“Look, I know this isn’t the thousands of dollars that you saw at HQ, the hundreds of thousands that we ended up with,” Rogowsky said in a recent TextSavvy show. “But the difference is that HQ was funded by venture capital. They had $8 million in the bank to start. They got another $15 million from other venture capitalists. We don’t get it… This is a low-budget opera, because I’m paying for it!”
Rogowsky says he has talked to investors about Savvy and has even gotten some tempting offers. But venture backing often comes with pressure on founders to maximize returns as fast as they can, a model that can lead a business to failure, as HQ has proven.
“People want 10x and 100x [their investment]… I would be very happy to get to a point of profitability where we can just keep growing the company, keep hiring more people, keep making more games,” Rogowsky says. This is what I want to do. I’ll do that as long as I continue to wake up every morning and say, “Oh my God, I’m excited to get up there in front of that camera and have fun.”
TextSavvy is currently running a “Season 0,” a soft launch that allows the team to iron out technical issues before officially launching on March 1st. So far, without much promotion, TextSavvy has reached 4,000 viewers overnight.
That’s not much compared to the HQ days. Then again, 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. “There’s no one to fire me. There’s no drama, there’s no tension. It’s not going to be a documentary about Savvy like it was about HQ.”
