Click Here for Hq trivia About the Game: What Happened To HQ Trivia? Why Did It Fail? HQ Trivia failed because it failed to keep its game exciting, due to intense competition, various technical issues, as well as issues with the founder’s leadership style. What Happened To HQ Trivia? Why Did It Fail? HQ Trivia is a live game show app that enables users to compete against each other and win real as well as virtual cash prizes. Here’s how it works: first, you download the app, which is available on mobile and tablet (Android and iOS) devices as well as on Apple TV. You then join its trivia game which takes place every Thursday at 09:00 pm ET. Back when the app launched, its games were hosted twice and on a daily basis. Once you entered the game, you will be greeted by its host who is being live-streamed from a studio and walks you through the questions. These days, the games are hosted by moderator and comedian Matt Richards (alongside a slew of other guest hosts). Players will then have to answer a total of 12 questions to win a cash prize, which is equally split among all winners. They have a total of 10 seconds to select one of the three available answers. If a wrong answer is given, they are barred from participating in the game. However, players can buy additional lives to stay in the game. The prize money can then be cashed out via PayPal. Initially, HQ Trivia set a minimum cash-out balance of $20 which it later removed. Apart from its trivia game, HQ has also released a second game called HQ Words , which is a ‘Wheel of Fortune’ type of game requiring players to fill out letter blocks to complete sentences. What Happened To HQ Trivia? HQ Trivia, headquartered in New York City and a sub-organization of Intermedia Labs, was founded in 2017 by Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov. Kroll and Yusupov are most notably known for co-founding the now-defunct Vine (alongside their third running mate Dom Hofmann). Vine, just a few months after they began working on it (and without even being released), was sold to Twitter for $30 million in the summer of 2012. In the coming years, Vine went from a cultural phenomenon to becoming one of the many companies being laid to rest in Twitter’s product graveyard. In October 2016, Vine was officially shut down. However, both Kroll and Yusupov had already moved on. Kroll, who became Vine’s general manager in January 2014, left the company just three months later. Officially, he resigned himself while people close to the matter stated that he was fired. During his tenure, he allegedly earned a reputation for exhibiting “creepy” behavior toward women that made them uncomfortable. Furthermore, he was often clashing with colleagues at the company and seen shouting at them. That behavior would later come back to haunt him at HQ Trivia (but more on that later). Not long after, in October 2015, Rus Yusupov was among the 300+ Twitter employees that were being let go to help the company streamline operations and become profitable. Kroll and Yusupov then got together to start Intermedia Labs, an app studio whose first product would become Hype, a product that allowed you to broadcast yourself with your phone camera. The app launched in late 2016. Unfortunately, Hype never received much hype and was therefore shut down not long after. Their next project, Bounce, let users create music videos by recording their dancing and have it then auto-synced to a song. Yet again, the app never really took off. Luckily, the third time was really the charm in their case. In late August 2017, the duo unveiled the iOS app for HQ Trivia to the world. One of the game’s instantaneous differentiators was its host Scott Rogowsky, a 33-year-old comedian who spent the past decade trying to make a name for himself. Prior to his HQ Trivia gig, he was even forced to move back into his family home as he struggled to get by financially. In the first few weeks, a few hundred players joined the regularly scheduled games. However, as media coverage increased, so did HQ’s user numbers. By the end of October, it had already over 10,000 concurrent players joining the games. In November, CEO Yusupov already got himself in some public trouble. He threatened to fire his star host Scott Rogowsky over a profile that the Daily Beast had written about Rogowsky. In there, the host said that, in spite of HQ’s exponential growth, he was still able to go outside “order his favorite salad from Sweetgreen” without people interrupting him. Despite Yusupov’s antics, HQ Trivia continued to grow like a wildfire. By the end of November, its games attracted over 100,000 viewers. The prize money went from $100 at the launch date to $7,500. To be able to fund those rewards, the team was reaching out to countless investors for funding. Unfortunately, they initially had a tough time raising due to the previously mentioned reputation Kroll gained as a manager at Twitter. In the meantime, to continue expanding and defend itself against the onslaught of new competitors (who, in some instances, were straight-up copies like The Q Trivia), HQ Trivia released its Android app at the beginning of December. It also launched in Canada that same month. By the end of 2017, HQ Trivia and its host Rogowsky became a cultural phenomenon. Some of its games were able to attract over 700,000 concurrent players. With the exponential rise in users, the app also experienced more and more technical issues. Its streams were often getting laggy, and at times, even completely crashing down (and thus had to be restarted). Regardless of those issues, the 1st of January ended up starting with a bang. The 9 pm game that date had over one million people request to join to win a $15,000 cash prize. HQ Trivia doubled down on the hype by launching a separate version of its game in the UK. After months of pitching to dozens of investors, Kroll and Yusupov were finally able to raise another round of funding (Lightspeed Ventures had initially poured $8 million into the business before it launched). Founders Fund, the investment arm of Peter Thiel, led a $15 million round that valued HQ Trivia at a whopping $100 million – less than six months after launching (in February 201. But HQ wouldn’t be HQ if that funding announcement didn’t come with its own set of challenges. The investment of Thiel’s fund, who became the center of public attention after publicly supporting Donald Trump and was responsible for the shutdown of Gawker (amongst many other questionable things), led to a public outcry against HQ Trivia. People went as far as proposing to #DeleteHQ via their Twitter handles. However, the criticism quickly faded in favor of players continuing to go crazy over the game. The most notable example became a viral video of a woman who went crazy over winning $11.30 during one of its January games. NBC even aired the clip just three minutes before its Super Bowl broadcast began, which led to an onslaught of new players. The company was also able to attract some major stars for cameos, including Robert De Niro, Jimmy Kimmel, and Sting. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson even guest hosted a game with a prize of $300,000. In March 2018, HQ Trivia launched an iPad app and began to find its first means of making money. For instance, the founders closed a $3 million deal with various companies, including Nike and Warner Bros., to run sponsored games within its app. The firm also created various themed quizzes, such as the ones it ran during the 2018 NBA finals in May and June. To that extent, it launched HQ Sports, a spinoff trivia game aimed at sports fans, in July. A month after, in August, HQ Trivia also added support for the Apple TV. Unfortunately, all of these additions stop the decline in user engagement that started to arise in the summertime. Its app rankings fell from the top 10 all the way into the hundreds. The company, as a result of its stagnating growth, named co-founder Colin Kroll as its newest CEO, effectively replacing Yu hq trivia hack
