The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia | My First Million Podcast
HQ Trivia, Viral Trends, and New App Ideas - February 26, 2020 (about 5 years ago) • 11:49
Transcript:
| Start Time | Speaker | Text |
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Shaan Puri | Okay what else you got | |
Sam Parr | okay so you have hq so hq died obviously | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Sam Parr | I thought like it could have been cool I'm like they could be like jeopardy jeopardy is huge | |
Shaan Puri | So, if you don't know what HQ was, it was a mobile app. It was a game show, like *Wheel of Fortune* or *Jeopardy*, but all done on a mobile app.
When I saw this product, our friend Eric, who does Tribe Socks, showed me this app. He was like, "Dude, my friend went to go work at this company. It's really interesting. Check this out." He pulls it up, and at 6 PM every day, they would do the game show.
You would get a notification at 6, open the app, and there was a host—a live guy, you know, a live game show host on live streaming. He would ask trivia questions, and you would push the button. You had 10 seconds to answer, so you would push the button real quick to answer.
If you got all 10 or 12 questions right, you'd win the prize at the end. At that time, there were about 400 players, and the prize was like $500. This thing grew like crazy; they had games with over 1,000,000 concurrent players.
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Sam Parr | I feel like something's like a 1000000 and a half | |
Shaan Puri | And exactly over 1,000,000 players participated. I believe they had over $1,000,000 in prize money over time. This thing had a significant run, and they received tons of funding; Founders Fund funded them.
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Sam Parr | $10,000,000 in funding at a $100,000,000 valuation | |
Shaan Puri | And then they had big-time brands launch stuff on there. They were like, "You know, this game is sponsored by Nike. It's all trivia about athletes, and we're going to drop the new shoe release that's happening live on HQ, and that's the prize." They were doing some interesting stuff, but it was kind of a fad. | |
Sam Parr | which everyone knew | |
Shaan Puri | Which everyone knew because it was like games have this hype cycle and then this decline over time. Games aren't super, super sticky; most of them. This was definitely that.
So, this big novelty grew like a crazy viral product. In many ways, as somebody who makes products, it was very inspiring because it was so simple yet so awesome. | |
Sam Parr | I actually felt like there... I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, but I felt like there were some revolutionary things. | |
Shaan Puri | For sure, it was like, "Oh, I'm looking at the future. This is what the future looks like." I still think that's what the future looks like. HQ died for many reasons.
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Sam Parr | so | |
Shaan Puri | Scott forgot | |
Sam Parr | founders are are fucking crazy | |
Shaan Puri | Literally, one founder died; he overdosed on drugs. The other founders are sort of always infighting. They both come across, at least from the outside, as a sort of moody artist. One of them, I believe, started Vine also.
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Sam Parr | russ yeah yeah or both of them | |
Shaan Puri | They are both the founders of Vine, so definitely sort of brilliant guys in a way. But the...
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Sam Parr | everyone says that russ is a dick | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, and so he got removed as CEO because he had some problems. He was, you know, a jerk or whatever. The other guy got removed too, but I never figured that out.
The game show host, Scott, became this kind of cult sensation because he was the host. Everyone saw him every day. He tweeted out when it shut down recently, saying, "This company died for one reason alone, and that's the sort of incompetence and arrogance of the founders." And I was like... | |
Sam Parr | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | Damn, that is like... you don't usually hear that. Everybody's so PC and always just worried about their career, no?
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Sam Parr | he's a comedian he didn't give a fuck | |
Shaan Puri | yeah he he definitely did not give a fuck because that was that was pretty brutal the day that it shut down | |
Sam Parr | Let's say, can I tell you what I would do?
Yes?
Okay, so I would... I have no idea if they did this or not, but I would have built this knowing that it's going to die. My thing is, I'm going to be a hit machine, right? I'm going to use this formula.
I always thought about this with, remember the cronut?
Yeah, okay. You know how these viral food things go viral? One day, I sat down and thought, "What makes them go viral?"
I've broken it down to a handful of categories. It's either... it's got to be a food that's typically a side, but you're going to eat it in excess. For example, only cookie dough instead of ice cream—that's just cookie dough.
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Shaan Puri | right or you make the you make the topping the main | |
Sam Parr | yep so like | |
Shaan Puri | one formula you could use | |
Sam Parr | Yep, another like... or like fondue. So, like, fondue is typically an appetizer, right? Another thing is you take the shape of it and you make it a ridiculous shape. Yes, easy. | |
Shaan Puri | including small to big like there's bob's donuts here my next one was which is sizing | |
Sam Parr | so you make something small big big small | |
Shaan Puri | right | |
Sam Parr | The fifth or fourth thing is color. Rainbow right bagels. So you just take the color green ketchup.
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Shaan Puri | instagrammable yes | |
Sam Parr | Yes, and then I had a fifth one, which was mashups, like the cronut, right, Crystal? Oh yeah, and then that was the fifth one you did.
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Shaan Puri | The Doritos Locos Taco is one of the most successful fast food items in the last 10 years. It was this Doritos Locos Taco that led every fast food chain to hire agencies to say, "Find me the next Doritos Locos Taco."
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Sam Parr | And so those are the five categories that I discovered. Then it's like, okay, so you just make it go viral by having distribution via Thrillist, BuzzFeed, and then eventually it's like, well, you just have your own handle. You're just going to make these go, and then you're going to have a small shop outside in Brooklyn or in Manhattan, and you're just going to...
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Shaan Puri | you're always putting out bangers | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, you're just gonna **knock it out of the park** and you're gonna have a line all the time. Then, three months later, boom! That one shuts down. Switch! Now we're doing cookie dough ice cream.
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Shaan Puri | so every season you come out with a new one viral sensation | |
Sam Parr | yeah it's like alright now we're doing I | |
Shaan Puri | love this | |
Sam Parr | We're doing rainbow cake now, or green ketchup and hot dogs. You're just like, "Okay."
I've always thought about it, and I'm like, "Man, that's the way to go." You just have a small... you're just banging these out.
Then for the ones that last, that are hits, like Corona, might be a hit. I mean, that's kind of like its own category now. Yep, then you've got one of your temple franchises, right?
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Shaan Puri | it's always available | |
Sam Parr | yeah that's what I would do and then so with hq trivia I would have done the same thing | |
Shaan Puri | So, this is like **supreme** for food. It's like you have this limited, scarce kind of out there thing. What you're doing is you're making these sort of wild concoctions on the food side using these five different [ingredients or elements]. | |
Sam Parr | but it's all formulaic | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, it's just like following one of these five formulas. Zynga, and then you do a limited edition drop. You basically say, you know, you tweet out at 1 AM, "It's live." You get a huge line. People cover the fact that there's a line, and then it becomes a thing in the hipster town.
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Sam Parr | yeah this is so easy like bagel bites like pizza on bagel | |
Shaan Puri | So, this is back when you were doing your hot dog stand. If you knew everything you know now, but you still needed to do a hot dog stand, you would end up doing something more like this.
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Sam Parr |
Like green ketchup... That was my shtick. The ketchup would only be green, right? And what I did back then was... I had a little shtick. Mine was my onions - I would boil them in Coca-Cola, which a lot of people do. I would just tell everyone I did that.
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Shaan Puri | right | |
Sam Parr | And so, there's actually a famous copywriting trick. Have you ever heard of a wristwatch being described as having "quartz movement"? Yes, they all have *fucking* quartz movement, right? They all do. All of them do. Or like "space age aluminum"? That's not even a thing, first of all.
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Shaan Puri | like what's that mad men line it's it's like our filters are rolled or something like that yeah | |
Sam Parr | And they're like, "Well, everyone's is." And they're like, "Well, they don't know it." Right? So, space-age aluminum... that means nothing. First of all, all aluminum.
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Shaan Puri | first of all nonsense | |
Sam Parr | Yeah, and second of all, quartz movement. Every single watch has that, right?
So the idea here is you just take something that they don't know, even though all the insiders know, and you just tell them.
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Shaan Puri | Right, we did this experiment when we were working on the sushi restaurant. We took the descriptions of our food. For example, a Philadelphia roll, which is an Americanized sushi roll made with salmon, cream cheese, and cucumber.
Dan Ariely, who was one of our advisors and the author of "Predictably Irrational," told us that one of the reasons wine charges a premium is because they created a whole language around what they do. He suggested that we need to create a language around sushi so that people who start to learn about it feel like they know more and are willing to pay more for a better experience. We just needed to teach them what the better option is.
So, we started adding descriptive words. One experiment involved having two versions of our website. One version was for normal online ordering, while the A/B test was the other variation. In this version, the Philadelphia roll would still be called the Philadelphia roll, but the description would read: "Atlantic fresh, never frozen salmon with authentic Philadelphia cream cheese and finely sliced cucumber." We would raise the price, and surprisingly, we received more orders even despite the higher price. | |
Sam Parr | that's crazy | |
Shaan Puri | and and so is this like a psychological thing around yeah | |
Sam Parr | that shit works | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, around the descriptions of things.
Okay, back to HQ for a second. They did try to release other games. They came out with a word scramble type game. I think they kind of ran out of time, and also they had built the hype too much.
A lesson to be learned: when you build this much hype, if you start to fail, you death spiral way faster. The hype and the pressure of your expectations will crush you. | |
Sam Parr | Well, so that's what I mean. I would have built this company expecting that, like we discussed, that clog. Then they're like, "Well, they're building it, so they're gonna just capture all the value upfront and then let it die."
Right? So if you would have built that, like built that into it, it could have been a company kind of like I imagine Zynga does this. They just have, like, "Alright, this game is only gonna last 80 days, maybe."
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Shaan Puri | So, two quick ideas on this HQ thing.
HQ died, okay? You know, rest in peace. But there are two things you could do if you wanted to make use of the insights that were found in this. I think you could do this on top of Twitch, YouTube, or any live streaming platform that already has an audience.
You don't need to create your own app; you should just host a channel that's hosting a show and give away the prize money, promoting it in the same way. I think somebody could build this on top of one of the existing platforms. It's not enough to build your own tech and not have to acquire downloads of your app, which is really expensive. If you just did this every day at 7 PM on Twitch, I think a bunch of people would tune in.
The second idea around this is maybe the HQ format, which is this live video streaming with a charismatic host and question and answer, could be used in education. I would love to see somebody create an after-school game that parents actually pay $3 a week to subscribe to, where your kid learns science through some Bill Nye the Science Guy type of host. It's trivia, it's interactive, and they get points as they...
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Sam Parr | that's interesting answering | |
Shaan Puri | I thought about starting that company, but I really think that it could work. I think it might also have the sort of fade in interest.
But I remember as a kid, I loved Brain Quest and I played all these learning games. They were great. So, I think this is a modern-day version of that.
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Sam Parr | That is quite sticky. I think that as we get older... I mean, your kid's not old enough, so I imagine you'll learn this once she gets old enough. But these things that we use since we were kids were just huge. Yes, huge! I'm into that. | |
Shaan Puri | And you wouldn't need tens of millions of people because you're not advertising. You'd be on subscription. Parents would be like, "Oh, I don't have to drop my kid off at tutoring, and I don't have to learn this myself. My kid already wants to sit in front of the iPad all day."
So, okay, here's an iPad game that I feel good about because you're learning. It's kind of cool because it's live and interactive, and I could play with you. I'll pay $3 a week for that.
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Sam Parr | Do you want to hear what I've found in that same category? I'll come back with some more research, but I was just surfing around and saw it is about allowance.
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Shaan Puri | okay tell me more | |
Sam Parr | so a friend ramon's kid had I was like I was like hey | |
Shaan Puri | victor allowance | |
Sam Parr | Does your dad give you an allowance? He better be giving you some money, right?
He goes, "Yeah, but it's all on this app." I was like, "What do you mean?"
He's like, "Well, it is automated. I get $10 a week if I do everything. I have a list of everything I gotta do, and then it just sends me this $10. But it sends it into an account, and I can use those at the places that he's already approved for me to spend it on. Or, if he wants, I can get this debit card that only works at a handful of places."
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Shaan Puri | that's a great idea | |
Sam Parr | yeah I was like | |
Shaan Puri | of course obviously that's a of course idea yeah I get mad at myself for not thinking of it | |
Sam Parr | So, I'm going to go. I haven't thought about it. I haven't seen their financials or anything. I've done... I'm going to.
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Shaan Puri | yeah |