Scott Rogowsky is a comedian – he knows how to make fun of himself. That’s how he ended up roaming New York City Comic Con with his own photo printed out like a “Wanted” poster, filming himself asking strangers, “Have you seen this man?”
These passersby showed a flicker of recognition, looking at the tall, bearded man like someone they had known in a past life, but couldn’t quite place.
“You look familiar! Where do I know you from?” someone asks, as though Rogowsky could be a friend of a friend they had met at a party.
“I know your face,” another person says, staring thoughtfully at the 41-one-year-old.
A cosplayer dressed as a Ghostbuster finally figures it out.
“Did you used to do that game show online?” he asks. “Like, every night?”
Rogowsky was just poking fun at himself, embracing the persona of a washed-up internet sensation. “I know my place,” he tells TechCrunch. “I’m not walking around like everybody’s 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, then faded out of the public consciousness almost as fast. Between 2017 and 2019, Rogowsky hosted the live mobile game show twice a day. At its peak, it drew more than 2.4 million daily viewers each night. It garnered 20 million lifetime downloads.
Now thecomedian is back with an app of his own called Savvy, which shares a lot of the DNA of HQ. Savvy’s first game, TextSavvy, is a daily live game show where players can earn cash — only this time, viewers are competing against Rogowsky in a word puzzle game that’s something like a hybrid of The New York Times’ Wordle and Connections, rather than trivia.
“I believe this is my calling in a weird way,” Rogowsky says. “I get up there in front of that camera, there’s 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 predated TikTok — and became a genuine cultural sensation. National news channels ran stories about office workers dropping everything in the middle of the day to play HQ at 3 p.m. It was groundbreaking – appointment entertainment in a new format for the streaming era – until the company imploded 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 she published an interview with Rogowsky where he mentioned liking Sweetgreen salads (Yusupov apparently didn’t want to give the fast-food chain free publicity). Most of 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 it was – quite literally – giving away money, and it never developed a meaningful plan to monetize or build a sustainable business model. The company ultimately filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, with its demise later becoming fodder for dramatic documentaries and true-crime-adjacent podcasts dissecting how such a promising app failed so spectacularly.
This was, understandably, a real blow for Rogowsky. But more bad luck followed. A baseball superfan, Rogowsky had left HQ Trivia in 2019 for a job hosting a daily MLB Network show. He felt like he finally made it – he still lights up recalling running into Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez in the bathroom. But his show was cancelled when the pandemic shut down baseball. He tried a handful of times over the years to recreate a company like HQ, but it was a journey of false starts.
“Crazy s–t happened that I had no control over, and I felt like I was being tossed and turned on this raft in the ocean, just getting battered by things I can’t control, and that was sort of my attitude about life in general,” he says.
He considered himself retired from show business and opened a vintage store in California. But he missed comedy.
“I went through this very meaningful personal transformation in the last couple of years,” he said. That process culminated in a seven-day mountain retreat called “the Hoffman Process,” a program that he describes as a digital detox combining lessons in psychology and neuroscience 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 got out of that retreat and I was like, ‘I have something to say. People find me funny and entertaining. I find myself funny and entertaining.’”
People tuned into HQ Trivia for the prospect of winning a cash prize, but the odds of winning were slim. Millions of viewers came back each night because of Rogowsky’s quick wit and charm, which earned him a cult following of fans who still call him “Quiz Daddy.”
“From the psychological, emotional side, I couldn’t really process what was going on,” Rogowsky says, reflecting on his viral fame. “And in the seven humbling years since, I have a vastly new perspective… I have my fanbase, I have my core followers right here. They’re on board with me, and it’s a matter of getting the word out.”
Rogowsky received a lot of 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 grabbed his attention.
“The idea was the host plays against the audience, so it’s like a two-way interaction,” Rogowsky says. “Imagine HQ if I wasn’t just asking the questions but also answering [them]… That adds another layer to it that no one had thought of before.”
But in the age of AI, where players can easily look up answers, Rogowsky was skeptical that a trivia game could work fairly, so Savvy embraced word puzzles instead.
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 are funding the company themselves.
“Look, I know this isn’t the thousands of dollars that you saw on HQ, the hundreds of thousands that we eventually got to,” Rogowsky said on one recent TextSavvy broadcast. “But the difference is 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 got that… This is a low-budge operashe because I’m paying for it!”
Rogwosky says he has spoken with investors about Savvy and even gotten some enticing offers. But venture backing often comes with pressure on founders to maximize returns as fast as they can, a model that can set a business up to fail, as HQ demonstrated.
“People want to 10x and 100x [their investment]… I’d be very happy to get to a point of profitability, to where we can just keep growing the company, keep hiring more people, keep making more games,” Rogowsky says. “I’m not looking for some type of eight-figure, nine-figure exit. 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 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 work through technical kinks before formally launching on March 1. So far, without much promotion, TextSavvy has peaked at about 4,000 viewers in one night.
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. There’s not going to be a documentary about Savvy the way there was about HQ.”
