The Rise and Fall of HQ, the Social Media Trivia Game Show
By: Mallory Joy
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Technology, Business, Startup

The Rise and Fall of HQ, the Social Media Trivia Game Show

From giving away $6 million to bankrupt in 2 years: what went wrong?

Photo by ROBIN WORRALL on Unsplash

In late August of 2017, the social media game show, HQ, suddenly appeared in iOS app stores across the globe with Android soon following. What was a brainchild of the creators of Vine, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, quickly became an internet and social media sensation.

But oh, how the mighty fall as a little over two years later, an announcement would drop on Twitter and on HQ notifications, stunning HQ fans and employees alike: HQ was bankrupt and going under.

But for those who kept tabs on the original host of HQ, Scott Rogowsky, this announcement came as no surprise. Rogowsky had been fairly open for months about his concerns with the company that he had left, and this openness only continued after the announcement of HQ’s unexpected demise.

Photo Credit: Twitter

But what was it that caused it? HQ fans have been stumbling around on Twitter asking the same questions for the last few days and I wanted to find out the answers for myself.

To find the answers, I had to take a deep dive into HQ’s history and into the jumbled and messy, sometimes Game-of-Thrones-like boardroom at HQ central, and into the belly of the beast with Yusupov and Kroll, the co-founders of HQ.

The Debut

In late 2017, HQ Trivia debuted and quickly became a viral sensation.

For those not familiar, HQ Trivia was a live trivia game played on an app consisting of 12 questions, each getting harder than the last, with a ten-second limit on each question. Users could win money by answering all the questions correctly. The prize money pot is split between how many people get all the way through the questions.

When it first began, there wasn’t a lot of media attention, because unlike other games you play on your phone, this one is live. You have to wait until a specific time to play (3 PM and 9 PM Eastern time when the app first premiered).

Going from a fledgling start-up to a viral sensation in such a short amount of time was laudable. The HQ co-founders were able to find significant investment money from a number of places when they first began.

At its peak, HQ Trivia had 2.3 million players on at one time playing a trivia game.

Playing the game was addictive. The thrill of the competition was there. There was real money on the line and there was real competition.

When HQ Trivia first debuted, a lot of people had great hopes for the fledgling start-up. Tech-crunch, a tech blog, noted that HQ had lots of ways to monetize and lots of ways to grow. Sadly, those hopes were dashed as the actions of the CEO simply didn’t harness his company in the right way.

The Infighting Begins

Things began to turn messy internally for HQ in 2018 with many of the employees caught in the middle of a CEO battle. While Yusupov was the current CEO at the time, many thought he was mismanaging the company and not leading it forward, but rather dragging it downward. They had the statistics to prove it.

HQ’s stats in app downloads and playtime had plummeted.

Many believed that Yusupov was simply looking out for himself. He had no interest in the interests of the company.

The employees then turned to Colin Kroll, the co-founder of HQ, and the man people saw as the leader and the one who believed in the company and the content.

Jeremy Liew, who was an early investor in HQ, made the call and named Kroll as the new CEO and shifted Yusupov into a more creative content position, which, as you could imagine did not sit well with Yusupov.

Unfortunately for the company, Kroll was found dead in his Manhattan apartment in December of 2018. Many wondered if this due to the strain and stress that he was under.

Kroll’s father said in an interview with the New York Times, “He worked too many hours and too hard. I think New York City got to him a little bit. All of that leads to getting too many drugs or bad drugs and overdosing.”

The Beginning of the End

Kroll’s death seemed like the death-knell that HQ couldn’t come back from.

Viewership seemed to flag and the infighting at HQ central seemed to only grow as Yusupov shifted back into the CEO driver’s seat.

In February 2019, 20 employees at HQ signed a formal letter petitioning the board to remove Yusupov from the position of CEO. They cited the continuing decrease in download numbers and concerns that Yusupov would simply run the flagging company into the ground with them aboard.

Liew, the early investor who many turned to for leadership, agreed to the petition and began to help the board look for new leadership.

Unfortunately, after some rearranging, Yusupov came out as interim CEO, clinging to power by threads, and orchestrated the firing of two of his most vocal adversaries and the ones who had started the petition for his ousting in the first place.

Employees continued to worry that there was little transparency about how much money remained in the bank and many worried they were running out of time to find a new CEO and a new investor.

As a result, employees at HQ slowly began to leave, finding new places of employment, seeing the writing on the wall and leaving before the company ran out of money.

It wasn’t long after this that Scott Rogowsky, the beloved host of HQ Trivia, would take his bow and exit HQ. Rogowsky wanted to diversify what he was doing and wanted to pursue his own personal interest in a baseball talk show he was creating, but Yusupov remained staunchly against him splitting time with HQ.

Rogowsky chose to leave, reading the writing on the wall.

The Drunken Hurrah

On February 14, 2020, HQ Trivia fans were greeted with a surprising push notification on their phones. Instead of the usual notification of the next trivia time, it was the notification that their favorite trivia show would be no more.

Photo Credit: Twitter

In a letter shared with employees, it was announced that HQ Trivia was officially out of money, that the employees effectively were out of a job, and that there was no severance pay to be had for anyone.

A little over six hours later, trivia host Matt Richards and HQ Words host Anna Roisman staggered onto the screen for HQ After Dark for one final hurrah.

It was clear within the first five seconds they both had been drinking, but let’s be honest, who could blame them.

They both had lost their jobs completely unexpectedly and were facing an uncertain future. HQ Trivia had no money, so Matt Richards actually fronted the money for the evening and put up $5 for the prize for the night.

In an expletive and champagne-filled 50 minutes, Richards and Roisman celebrated and grieved with their HQ fans. As the hour progressed, things clearly began to devolve into madness, which only began to be more appropriate for the madness that HQ had turned into.

The champagne they were drinking? It was supposedly being saved for when they hit 3 million players, but clearly needed to be consumed at that moment.

The demise of HQ Trivia was ugly, and the final episode was glorious and a gracious nod to Roisman and Richards and everything they had done for their fans.