Remember HQ? “Quiz Daddy” Scott Rogowski is back with TextSavvy, a daily mobile game show

Scott Rogowski is a comedian who knows how to make fun of himself. So he ended up wandering around New York City’s Comic-Con with his photo printed like a “wanted” poster, filming himself asking strangers: “Have you seen this guy?”

These passers-by showed a flash of appreciation, looking at the tall bearded man like he was someone they knew in their past lives, but they couldn’t quite place him.

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

“I know your face,” says another, staring at the 41-year-old.

A cosplayer dressed as Ghostbuster has finally figured it out.

“You used to do this online game show?” he asks. “Like every night?”

Rogowski was just making fun of himself, embracing the persona of an internet sensation. “I know my place,” he tells TechCrunch. “I don’t walk around like everyone’s supposed to know who I am.”

But seven years ago, everyone did it.

Rogowsky was previously the face of HQ Trivia, an app that exploded into popular culture, then faded from the public consciousness almost as quickly. Between 2017 and 2019, Rogowski hosted the live mobile game show twice a day. At its peak, it attracted more than 2.4 million daily viewers each night. It has 20 million lifetime downloads.

Now the comedian is back with his own app called Savvy, which shares much of HQ’s identity. Savvy’s first game, TextSavvy, is a daily live game show where players can earn cash — only this time, viewers compete against Rogowsky in a word puzzle game that resembles a mix of The New York Times’ Wordle and Connections, rather than trivia.

“I think in a weird way this is my calling,” Rogowski says. “I stand there in front of that camera, and there are thousands of people watching at home — millions, in HQ days — and it just flows.”

HQ Trivia was founded by the creators of Vine — the short-form video platform that preceded 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 at headquarters at 3 p.m. It was groundbreaking — appointment entertainment in a new format for the streaming era — until the company collapsed in a barrage of unfortunate circumstances.

One of the founders, Colin Kroll, died of a drug overdose. The other founder, Rus Yusupov, was a divisive leader who clashed with his employees. He once threatened a journalist that he would fire Rogowski if she published an interview with Rogowski in which he mentioned his admiration for Sweetgreen’s salads (Yusupov apparently didn’t want to give the fast food chain free publicity). Most important of all, HQ Trivia falls victim to the same trap that befalls many startups. The company raised a $15 million funding round at a $100 million valuation, but was — quite literally — giving away money, and never put together a meaningful plan to generate income or build a sustainable business model. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, and its demise subsequently became fodder for dramatic documentaries and true-crime-adjacent podcasts detailing how this promising app failed so spectacularly.

This was a real blow to Rogowski. But more bad luck followed. Rogowsky, a baseball fan, left HQ Trivia in 2019 for a job hosting a daily show for MLB Network. He feels like he’s finally made it — he’s still radiant as he recalls bumping into Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez in the bathroom. But his offer was canceled when the pandemic halted baseball. He had tried several times over the years to recreate a company like Headquarters, but it was a trip of false starts.

“Something crazy happened that I had no control over, and I felt like I was being tossed and turned on this raft in the ocean, getting hit by things I couldn’t control, and that was kind of my attitude toward life in general,” he says.

He considered himself retired from show business and opened a vintage store in California. But he missed the comedy.

“I’ve been going through this very meaningful personal transformation in the last couple of years,” he said. This process culminated in a seven-day mountain retreat called “Process Hoffman,” a program he describes as a digital detox that combined lessons in psychology and neuroscience that helped him “get on top of things.” [his] Life again.”

“It gave me a lot of clarity to say, ‘You know, I have a lot to do here,’” Rogowski says. “I walked out of that resort and said to myself: ‘I have something to say. People find me funny and entertaining. “I find myself funny and entertaining.”

People were following HQ Trivia looking for the possibility of winning a cash prize, but the odds of winning were slim. Millions of viewers return every night because of Rogowski’s quick wit and charm, which has earned him a cult following among fans who still call him “Quiz Daddy.”

“Psychologically and emotionally, I couldn’t really process what was going on,” Rogowski says, reflecting on his viral fame. “And in the seven humble years that have followed, I’ve had a whole new perspective… I have a fan base, I have my core following here. They’re with me, and it’s about spreading the word.”

Rogowski received a lot of letters over the years from people who wanted to help him build the next headquarters. But last year, a direct message on 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,” Rogowski says. “Imagine HQ if I was not only asking questions, but answering [them]…This adds another layer to it that no one had thought about before.

But in the age of artificial intelligence, where players can easily look up answers, Rogowski was skeptical that a trivia game could work fairly, so Savvy embraced word puzzles instead.

The most Savvy has paid out in a single game is about $400, a small amount compared to the occasional six-figure prize pools at headquarters. This is because Rogowski and his co-founders finance the company themselves.

“Look, I know these are not the thousands of dollars that you saw at headquarters, but the hundreds of thousands that we end up with,” Rogowski said on a recent TextSavvy podcast. “But the difference is that the headquarters 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 that… This is a low-budget opera because I’m paying for it!”

Rogwosky says he talked to investors about Savvy and even got some attractive offers. But venture backing often comes with pressure on founders to maximize returns as quickly as possible, a model that can set up a company for failure, as HQ showed.

“People want 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,” Rogowski says. “I’m not looking for some kind of eight-figure or nine-figure exit. This is what I want to do. I will do that as long as I keep waking up every morning and saying, “Oh my God, I’m excited to get in front of that camera and have fun.”

TextSavvy is currently running “Season 0,” a beta launch that allows the team to work through the technical kinks before officially launching on March 1. So far, without much promotion, TextSavvy has peaked at around 4,000 viewers in one night.

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

“We’re not going anywhere this time,” Rogowski said. “There’s no one to fire me. There’s no drama, there’s no tension. There won’t be a documentary about Savi like there was with HQ.”