The Magic of HQ Trivia
The future of live entertainment is participatory, and looks a lot like the past.
HQ Trivia launched in October of 2017, and in the weeks that followed, proceeded to hit record breaking numbers week after week. For ~72 hours, this record what quite the achievement for the live trivia app.
To put in perspective what 880,000+ players actually means, BuzzFeed’s Exploding Watermelon had 807,000 concurrent viewers watching at its peak — and that’s BuzzFeed, on top of Facebook’s algorithm (which at the time was heavily promoting live video streams), reaching iPhones, Android devices, and desktop browsers. A few more caveats:
- HQ doesn’t rely on Facebook/Twitter for social graph or reach
- It’s 880,000+ concurrent players (not passive viewers)
3 days later, HQ blew right past the 1 million mark, setting a new record for concurrent players: 1.2 million.
That was a special achievement, and a real breakthrough on the infrastructure side — keeping in mind that this is a small startup with limited resources, unlike Facebook which has hundreds of engineers working on video.
This was the kind of scale Facebook had in mind when launching Facebook Live two years go, months after Meerkat and Periscope popularized livestreaming on a mobile device. I remember texting Ben Rubin, my old boss at Meerkat, a screenshot of Mark Zuckerberg’s stream with the caption “1.3 million views” — in disbelief (that includes replay views an hour after). How is a startup supposed to compete with Mark Zuckerberg’s 100M+ followers and Facebook’s algorithm machine promoting the broadcast?
HQ has only been out for 3 months, and it’s already beating Zuckerberg’s inaugural Facebook Live for concurrent viewer numbers.
For context, The Young Turks has 3.5M YouTube subscribers and was celebrating (an impressive) 100,000 concurrent viewers during prime election coverage. At 1.2 million and growing, in 2018 HQ could reach prime-time television numbers.
The app is taking off with just about every demographic. It feels new. It feels different. It feels like the future (maybe a little bit too much).
Word of Mouth 📈
Organic word of mouth growth is driving HQ’s rise, along with dozens of community building tactics and clever growth initiatives that enhance the overall experience.
Getting an extra life for sharing a referral code.
This is particularly effective via messaging apps, and in large groups of co-workers and friends before a game starts or after a game wraps up.
Even celebrities and influencers are sharing their referral codes and posting about the app, without being paid or asked. This is driving thousands of sign-ups and millions of impressions for HQ Trivia. These kinds of authentic reactions work better on social media for driving awareness and app downloads, compared to scripted promotions or direct call to actions.
Creating questions that have the potential to become authentic social content.
HQ is adding cultural references and naming influential people/companies right into the questions, which makes it more relatable to the audience. People may be fans of the show Arrested Development, might listen to Gimlet Media podcasts or work at the company, and the lead singer of Evanescence happens to be a user of HQ Trivia. Adding these shout outs into the game makes people feel special — it makes them want to tweet about the game and tell their audience about the app.
Community building from the very beginning.
HQ Trivia hosts have been giving audience shout outs by mentioning specific users by name from the very first game, back when it was 5,000 people. They’ve kept up the tradition now that the size of the audience is much bigger, which makes people feel special — something to look forward to when the game is about to begin. These small, intangible things can make a big difference for community building.
Bringing people together in the real world (this is key).
Friends, co-workers, families at the dinner table — generations of people from youngest to oldest all over the country are playing HQ Trivia.
Seeing friends, classmates, and co-workers playing the game and downloading the app to not feel left out (and because it looks fun) is arguably the app’s biggest growth drivers. I’m willing to bet the founders didn’t expect this when coming up with the app’s concept — playing trivia together was not a common behavior two months ago… And yet, thousands of people are sharing pictures and videos of themselves in large groups playing HQ Trivia.
The HQ team empowers the community.
HQ doesn’t have a landing page, the company’s website is the @HQTrivia Twitter feed, which communicates important information and highlights how the community is using the app. The company’s official Twitter account (and @ScottRogowsky) retweets or likes a tweet, it makes people feel special. Other people see that, which leads to more people taking pictures and videos of themselves playing the game and tagging Scott and the HQ Trivia account. It’s community building 101 — and it just so happens there’s a lot of good content to go around…
Participatory Live Video 🔴
I’m fascinated by how HQ uses push notifications and regular time slots to enable live audience participation — which is central to the experience. The difference between Facebook Live/Periscope and HQ Trivia, is that audience participation isn’t a nice to have, it’s an integral part of the content.
“There’s a point-of-view live, where you’re experiencing something through someone else’s phone, and then there’s this idea of interactive video, where the audience is actually a key component of driving the content,” he said. “I became really interested in the latter and saw there was a real absence in the market of that sort of experience.” — Colin Kroll, co-founder and CTO of HQ Trivia
The magic of HQ Trivia comes down to live audience participation, at scale, synchronously.
Unlike other forms of live video, which give the illusion of audience participation (comments flying in too quickly to keep up with), HQ’s approach scales to larger audiences while improving the experience.
The prize money doesn’t scale to larger audiences — without giving away more money. The more people play, the more participants end up winning and splitting the prize. But given people’s reactions to winning $60, $59.40, $12.58, $11.30, $9.93, and $1.34, that part doesn’t matter that much.
Prize money is not the primary incentive for most people using the app.
Audience Participation vs. Broadcasting
Live audience participation was our primary focus at Meerkat. It was the North Star that helped determine every new feature, including highly requested features that we never ended up adding (like video replays, which Periscope and Facebook Live have and rely on). The goal was to make audience participation an essential part of the content — we didn’t want to democratize live television broadcasting through a mobile device.
Nothing was more representative of our audience participation intentions than the “cameo” feature, which we added a few months after launch. Cameo enabled the audience to be directly part of the content.
P.S. I talk about this as “we” and “our” vision, but that’s because I am used to writing company announcements (which started at Meerkat, where I had to pay very close attention to the vision Ben Rubin was describing). Meerkat ended up pivoting to HouseParty — a much more successful live video app. 🏠🎉
We also tested other approaches to audience participation that didn’t quite work out.
For every show in U2’s 2015 worldwide tour, Bono would bring a fan on stage and hand them an iPhone with a special “Bono version” of the Meerkat app (that streamed horizontally). For two songs, the fan would live stream the band right from the stage, and the stream would be shown on a giant screen facing the audience.
It was one of the coolest collaborations I’ve ever been involved in, but it didn’t really move the needle. The audience in the arena loved it, and started expecting the Meerkat part of the show to come, and U2 was happy, but users of the app were passive viewers in someone else’s live broadcast. After a few shows it lost it’s magic.
HQ Trivia got so many things right… 👏
The game concept, the high production value, referral codes, minimal push notifications, set time slots, the countdown music , coming up with interesting content for questions, finding entertaining hosts, giving people free money… HQ got a lot of things right, right from the start.
HQ didn’t reinvent the wheel, they created a complete shared expirience around a live trivia game concept.
Regular Time-Slots
The fact that you can only use the app twice a day, at a set time, is one of the biggest innovations of HQ Trivia. These are consistent time slots that are accurate to the minute (like TV programming), which is totally different than regularly scheduled live shows at slightly different time slots.
U2 went live 2–3 times a week on Meerkat for longer than than the number of weeks HQ Trivia has been out, but the showtimes were always different. The band(‘s social media people) even used our scheduling feature to share their upcoming streams on Twitter and inside the app, but it never amounted to more than a few thousand concurrent live audience (the band’s dedicated fan base is larger than that).
Push Notifications Done Right
Not only are people planning their lives around HQ’s regular time-slots, but they instantly drop whatever they’re doing when the game’s about to start.
Push notifications are the life of any live video app. Turn off push notifications or start messing around with the settings, and the chances of getting a user to tune in to a live video are slim. At the same time, every live streaming app runs into the exact same issue: push notification fatigue.
Between constant notifications when someone you follow goes live, schedules a stream, follows you, joins the app, and variety of other notifications, live streaming apps fill up smartphone lock-screens — until they’re ignored or completely ignored or turned off completely.
HQ sends two push notifications per day, and the demand is there for more games and more daily interactions with the app.
The Countdown
HQ had the foresight to add a buffer between the time the push notification goes out and when the actual game starts. That is essential for the knockout trivia format to work properly. The downside of that, is that you end up making your most attentive users wait for a few minutes as the live audience builds up.
Faced with this reality, HQ could have started running ads or sponsored messages prior (which I actually think the community would have accepted, as there are questions where all that prize money is comes from). Instead, the team saw it as an opportunity to delight. ✨
People don’t feel like they’re waiting, it feels like part of the content. People are dancing, singing, and freestyling to the HQ Trivia countdown.
The intro messages before the countdown starts creates a consistent experience that reinforces the community values.
It’s the perfect Hook Model for building habit forming products.
️️Experimenting ⚗️
A lot of opportunities to mix things up… HQ can experiment with new games formats, new time lots, surprise times lots, and geo-specific games that are unique to each country (like the U.K. most recently).
Holding back to back games (which are never previously announced) is also something HQ has started doing at times.
The app can also start sending increasingly customized push notifications, like they’ve done with the U.K. game, and that they can break down into even smaller geo-locations or time-zones.
The ability to customize who the notification goes out to and how it’s presented can make a big difference — and I’ve seen first hand at Product Hunt (having spent over a year sending custom push notifications 7–9 times a day to hundreds of thousands of browsers). Every little thing, from the copy, to the use of emojis, description, title, media image — it all impacts the notification’s performance. I’d be surprised if HQ isn’t A/B testing their notifications already (and likely from the start).
There’s a lot more HQ can do within the Trivia genre as well.
An overnight sensation, one year in the making 🌱
In October on the day the launch, co-founder and CEO Rus Yusupov told TechCrunch that “The players and audience experience is always going to be the most important.” It’s subtle, but quite different from other live video apps, as well as the company’s first attempt at interactive live video, HYPE.
HYPE launched in November of 2016 (still available on the App Store) and was described as a tool for creators, coupled real-time audience input.
The founders’ original vision hasn’t changed. With HQ Trivia, Rus, Colin, and the team have found what they were trying to create with HYPE. The company’s first investor Jeremy Liew, described the vision in HYPE’s funding announcement in 2016, but this passage might as describe HQ Trivia:
There’s a lot to unpack here…
✅ “Higher production values” — HQ brings studio-level production to mobile live video
✅ “If creators were just given the right tools…” (or brought in-house, and went live from office studio with a real-time video effects team)
✅ “It’s about creating new genres, native to the mobile native format…” The press seems to be having a hard time defining what HQ Trivia actually is (which sounds like a new genre to me)
- “Is This App the Future of Game Shows?” (The Hollywood Reporter)
- “Is HQ Trivia the future of TV?” (The Outline)
- “Viral trivia sensation HQ looks like the future of both mobile gaming and live TV” (The Verge)
✅ “Who will be the Oprah/John Oliver of mobile video?” TBD, but HQ has turned Scott Rogowsky into a star in 2017.
Predictions 🔮
- HQ has staying power. The co-founders of HQ, Colin and Rus, have previously started Vine (together with Dom, who is now working on V2). Vine was an internet treasure that Twitter acquired and inexplicably shut down. They’ve learned from that and are more experienced now. With HQ, the founders are clearly onto something… and if anyone positioned to grow and expand on this new entertainment genre, it’s the people who started it.
2. Competitors will come. We’re going to see a lot more “HQ for X” apps and direct copycats that try to replicate HQ Trivia. That’s easier said than done, and from a user’s standpoint, it isn’t a zero-sum decision. HQ’s biggest challenge is continuing to grow and keeping existing audience entertained. HQ’s biggest threat is similar to Netflix’s.
3. Expanding into new categories. In 2018, HQ will expand into new categories that may resemble Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, American Idol, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, or something that we haven’t seen before that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of the smartphone (like the camera, to bring the audience into the content).
Sooner or later, the hype around HQ Trivia will come down as the novelty wears off. The press will start positioning new apps as competitors, users will churn, Facebook will copy the concept, etc.
Based on the app’s popularity, how the team has handled it, and given their willingness to try new things sooner than they have to, I’m excited to see what 2018 has in store for HQ Trivia, or more accurately, what HQ has planned for us.
