I originally published this post in my weekly-ish newsletter “Drinking from the Firehose.” Sign up to get it in your inbox: tinyletter.com/ataussig.
Savage.
That’s the word running through my head when HQ Trivia host Scott Rogowsky tells me that, unfortunately, my spelling of the word “embarrassed” is incorrect, and now I’m out of the game. Old millennials like me grew up with spell check. Despite a few decent academic credentials, I’d be nowhere in life without those squiggly red underlines in Microsoft Word.
How does an app that makes users want to so frequently throw their phone out the window bring them back day after day, and motivate them to tell a friend to download it?
That’s the magic of HQ. As investors in the company, we’ve had the opportunity to watch it grow and evolve since the very beginning (only a few months ago). A New York Times profile on the company linked below answered a lot of questions about the app, but I wanted to reiterate a few things about HQ that make it remarkable:
- Live only. Trivia is no fun without an audience. By constraining game play to two times per day, HQ ensures maximum attendance and activity. It also creates FOMO in the case you can’t join, especially when you see your friends sharing and tweeting questions they answered incorrectly. Trivia is most definitely a good use case for “appointment TV.”
- Family friendly. I’ve never seen an app shared so virally amongst groups of people in real life, other than perhaps the Snapchat lens phenomenon when it was first introduced. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, many users shared and tweeted photos of family members playing HQ together. I can think of three reasons why this works. First, trivia has strong cross-generational appeal. Second, it appeals to the competitive dynamics within groups of people. Third, HQ is hard, and more brains around the table means higher odds of success. HQ hits these notes and drives unusual, offline “screen to screen” virality.
- Makes people feel smart. How can you feel smart when by definition you have a 99%+ chance of losing every time you play? Well, you also get a lot of answers right too! There’s something self-validating about affirming knowledge, and then losing because the answers just get savagely hard.
- Catharsis. Speaking of losing, when it happens (inevitably for most of us), many users share a screenshot of the question that brought on their downfall. I liken it to a humblebrag that says “Look how far I got, and can you believe they asked this question?” It’s validating to hear from others on social media that they got that question wrong too.
And yes, I think the money plays a role too, but a small one. Mostly, HQ is about getting together with a community for 5–10 minutes twice a day and showing everyone on the internet what you’re made of.
While my excitement for HQ is palpable, it also furthers my conviction that a replacement for each of the most compelling TV formats on mobile is possible. HQ is part of a series of opportunities that go beyond trivia. We’ve made a few early stage investments in other digitally native TV apps and expect to make more in 2018.
“Is a Trivia App the Answer to Questions about Live Streaming?” (Link)
These are heady times for the creators of HQ Trivia.
The app, which broadcasts live shows to iPhones and iPads twice a day, has taken off since its debut in August. Its ability to attract tens of thousands of people to log in for each 15-minute segment in hopes of winning money by answering a dozen trivia questions has some wondering if it has reimagined the TV game show for the cord-cutting era.
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