Remember HQ? ‘Quiz Daddy’ Scott Rogowsky is back with TextSavvy, a daily mobile game show

Scott Rogowsky is a comedian — and he’s comfortable being the punchline. That’s how he found himself wandering around New York City Comic Con carrying what looked like a “Wanted” flyer featuring his own face, recording himself as he stopped strangers to ask, “Have you seen this man?”

Some people paused, squinting at the tall, bearded guy as if he were someone they recognised from a different chapter of their lives — familiar, but just out of reach.

“You look familiar! Where do I know you from?” one person asks, like Rogowsky might be a friend-of-a-friend they once met at a party.

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

Then a cosplayer dressed like a Ghostbuster finally connects the dots.

“Did you use to do that game show online?” he asks. “Like, every night?”

Rogowsky was partly doing a bit, leaning into the image of a former internet star who’d slipped from the spotlight. “I know my place,” he says. “I’m not walking around like everybody’s supposed to know who I am.”

But seven years ago, almost everybody did.

Rogowsky was once the unmistakable face of HQ Trivia — the live game-show app that surged into pop culture and then vanished from the zeitgeist nearly as quickly. From 2017 to 2019, Rogowsky hosted the show twice a day. At its peak, HQ pulled in more than 2.4 million nightly viewers. The app reached 20 million lifetime downloads.

Now Rogowsky is returning with an app of his own, called Savvy, that carries a lot of HQ’s genetic material. Savvy’s first game, TextSavvy, is a daily live game show where players can win cash — but with a twist: this time, the audience is playing against Rogowsky in a word-puzzle format. It’s closer to a mash-up of The New York Times’ Wordle and Connections than a traditional trivia contest.

“I believe this is my calling, weirdly,” Rogowsky says. “I get up there in front of that camera, there are thousands of people watching at home — millions, back in the HQ days — and it just flows.”

‘I have more to do here’

The founders of Vine created HQ Trivia — the short-video platform that preceded TikTok — and it became a genuine cultural moment. News segments highlighted office workers stopping what they were doing in the middle of the day to join HQ at 3 p.m. It felt new: appointment entertainment built for the streaming era. But the company eventually collapsed amid a perfect storm of misfortune.

One founder, Colin Kroll, died of a drug overdose. The other, Rus Yusupov, gained a reputation as a polarising leader who frequently clashed with employees. At one point, he reportedly warned a journalist that he’d fire Rogowsky if she published an interview where Rogowsky mentioned liking Sweetgreen salads (Yusupov apparently didn’t want the chain getting free publicity). More than anything, HQ got trapped by a classic startup problem: it raised $15 million at a $100 million valuation, yet it was — in the most literal sense — handing out cash without a real plan to monetise or build a sustainable business. HQ eventually filed for bankruptcy in February 2020, and its downfall later became the kind of story that documentary filmmakers and true-crime-adjacent podcasts love: a dramatic autopsy of how a breakout app imploded.

For Rogowsky, the crash was understandably painful. And then the bad timing kept coming.

A devoted baseball fan, Rogowsky left HQ in 2019 to host a daily show on MLB Network. It felt like a dream milestone — he still smiles when he remembers the moment he ran into Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez in the bathroom. But when the pandemic shut down baseball, the show was cancelled. Over the years, Rogowsky made multiple attempts to help revive something HQ-like, but the path was full of stalled efforts and dead ends.

“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.

At one point, he considered himself done with show business and opened a vintage store in California. But he missed performing.

“I went through this very meaningful personal transformation in the last couple of years,” he says. That journey led him to a seven-day mountain retreat called the Hoffman Process — which he describes as a digital detox mixed with lessons in psychology and neuroscience — and he says it 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 came to HQ for the chance at a cash prize, even though the odds of winning were always slim. But millions returned night after night largely because of Rogowsky’s quick humour and charisma — enough to build a cult following that still calls him “Quiz Daddy.”

“From the psychological, emotional side, I couldn’t really process what was going on,” Rogowsky says, looking back at his viral rise. “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.”

‘We’re not going anywhere this time’

Over the years, Rogowsky received countless messages from people suggesting they help him build the next HQ. But last year, one DM stood out: a message on X from European game designer Johan de Jager.

“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.”

Still, Rogowsky had doubts about bringing back trivia in an era where players can instantly search for answers — and where AI can make cheating even easier. So Savvy leaned into word puzzles instead.

So far, TextSavvy’s payouts are modest compared to HQ’s occasionally massive prize pools. The most Savvy has awarded in a single game is roughly $400. 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 during a recent TextSavvy broadcast. “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 got that… This is a low-budget opera because I’m paying for it!”

Rogowsky says he has talked with investors and even received some attractive offers. But he’s wary of what venture money can demand — pressure to chase massive returns quickly — and he believes that mindset can push companies toward the same kinds of choices that contributed to HQ’s collapse.

“People want to 10x and 100x [their investment]… I’d be very happy to get to a point of profitability, to where we can keep growing the company, keep hiring more people, keep making more games,” he says. “I’m not looking for some 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” — essentially a soft launch that gives the team time to iron out technical issues before an official launch on March 1. So far, without major marketing, TextSavvy has reached a peak of around 4,000 viewers in a single night.

That’s a small crowd compared to HQ’s glory days. But then again, when I first wrote about HQ, the app only had around 3,300 concurrent viewers. There’s no guarantee Savvy can recreate that lightning — but it’s not impossible either.

“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.”