Scott Rogowsky is a comedian – he knows how to make fun of himself. So he ended up wandering around New York City Comic Con with his own photo printed as a “Wanted” poster, filming himself asking strangers, “Have you seen this man?”
These passers-by showed a flash of appreciation, looking at the tall bearded man as someone they knew in a past life, but they couldn’t quite leave the place.
“You look familiar! How do I know you?” someone asks, as if Rogowsky might be a friend of a friend they met at a party.
“I know your face,” another person says, staring thoughtfully at the 41-year-old.
A cosplayer dressed as a Ghostbuster finally figures it out.
“Did you do that game show online?” he asks. “Like every night?”
Rogowsky was just making fun of himself and adopting the persona of a washed-up Internet sensation. “I know my place,” he tells TechCrunch. “I don’t go around like everyone knows who I am.
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But seven years ago, everyone was doing it.
Rogowsky was once the face of HQ Trivia, an app that exploded into popular culture and then disappeared from public consciousness almost as quickly. From 2017 to 2019, Rogowsky hosted a live mobile game show twice a day. At its peak, it attracted more than 2.4 million viewers a day every night. It has received 20 million lifetime downloads.
Now the comedian is back with his own app called Savvy, which shares much of HQ’s DNA. Savvy’s first game, TextSavvy, is a daily live game show where players can earn money — but this time, viewers compete against Rogowski in a word puzzle game that’s more like a hybrid of Wordle and The New York Times’ Connections than trivia.
“I believe it’s my calling in a special way,” Rogowsky says. “I get up there in front of the camera, thousands of people are watching at home — millions, in HQ time — and it just flows.
HQ Trivia was founded by the creators of Vine – the short video platform that predates TikTok – and has become a true cultural sensation. National news outlets aired stories of office workers dropping everything in the middle of the day to play at headquarters at 3 p.m. It was groundbreaking—meeting entertainment in a new format for the streaming era—until the company collapsed in a flurry of unfortunate circumstances.
One founder, Colin Kroll, died of a drug overdose; the other founder, Rus Yusupov, was a fractious leader who clashed with his staff. He once threatened a journalist to fire Rogowski if she published an interview with Rogowski in which he mentioned that he liked Sweetgreen salads (Yusupov apparently didn’t want to give the fast food chain free advertising). Above all, HQ Trivia has fallen victim to the same trap that has killed so many startups. The company raised a $15 million funding round at a $100 million valuation, but was giving money away—literally—and never developed a meaningful plan to monetize or build a sustainable business model. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, with its demise later becoming a breeding ground for true-crime drama documentaries and podcasts that dissect how such a promising app failed so spectacularly.
It was understandably a real blow for Rogowski. But another bad luck followed. A baseball superfan, Rogowsky left HQ Trivia in 2019 for a job hosting MLB Network’s daytime show. He felt like he finally made it—he still lights up and 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 recreate a company like HQ, but it was a road of false starts.
“It got crazy that I wasn’t in control, and I felt like I was being tossed and turned on this raft in the ocean, just being beaten by things I couldn’t control, and that was kind 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 lacked comedy.
“I’ve gone through this very meaningful 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 combining lessons in psychology and neuroscience that helped him “take back control of (his) life.
“It gave me a lot of clarity to say, you know what, I’ve got more to do here,” says Rogowsky. “I came out of that shelter and I was like, ‘I have something to say. People find me funny and funny. I find myself funny and funny.’
People tuned in to HQ Trivia for the prospect of winning a cash prize, but the odds of winning were slim. Millions of viewers returned nightly for Rogowski’s quick wit and charm, earning him a cult following of fans who still call him “Quiz Dad.”
“Psychologically and emotionally, I couldn’t really process what was going on,” says Rogowsky, reflecting on his viral fame. “And in the seven humbling years that have passed since then, I have a whole new perspective… I have my fan base, I have my core followers right here. They’re on board with me and it’s about getting the word out.”
Rogowsky has received many messages over the years from people wanting to help him build another headquarters. 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 headquarters if I not only asked questions, but also answered (them) … That adds another layer to it that no one had thought of before.”
But in the age of artificial intelligence, where players can easily search for answers, Rogowsky was skeptical that a trivia game could do justice, so Savvy embraced word puzzles instead.
The highest Savvy has paid out in a single game is around $400 – which is 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 it’s not the millions of dollars that you saw at headquarters, it’s the millions of thousands that we ended up with,” Rogowsky said on a recent TextSavvy broadcast. “But the difference is that headquarters was venture capital funded. They had $8 million in the bank to start with. They got another $15 million from other venture capitalists. We don’t have that… This is a low-budget operation because I’m paying for it!”
Rogwosky says he’s talked to investors about Savvy and even received some tempting offers. But venture capital backing often comes with pressure on founders to maximize revenue as quickly as they can, a model that can lead to business failure, as HQ demonstrated.
“People want 10x and 100x (their investment) … I’d love to see us get to a point of profitability where we can continue to grow the company, hire more people and make more games,” Rogowsky says. “I’m not looking for some type of eight-to-nine-figure exit. This is what I want to do. I’m going to do this as long as I wake up every morning and say, ‘Damn, I’m 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 technical issues before the formal launch 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. 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 like there was about HQ.”