We have so much content at our fingertips.
Want to watch a movie? Netflix is 3 clicks away. Want to see what your friends are up to? Look at their Instagram story. Want to compete in live trivia with millions of others for hundreds of thousands of $$?? Just go to HQ trivia.
HA remember? The rise and fall HQ Trivia was a fever dream that posed tons of lessons for Marketers like you and I.
And that’s what we’re here today to discuss…
As important as it is to learn the success stories, we Marketers also need to know what NOT to do. And HQ Trivia is a great teacher of the risk you pose by pushing features that your users don’t even want.
So let’s get into it.
The year was 2017 and Colin Kroll and Rus Yusupov had recently sold Vine to Twitter (ily Vine).
The two had made some noise in the tech space but were eager to build something new.
That’s when the pair developed a daily live trivia game with cash prizes that anyone with a phone could play, named HQ Trivia. And the game spread like wildfire.
Within 3 months, HQ reached 250,000 downloads. 0-250K in 3 months.
How?!
Creating viral loops.
HQ was a 12 question trivia game with increasingly difficult questions and you only had 1 life.
So if you didn’t know the capital of Alaska (Juneau btw) you’d be out for good. UNLESS, you shared your referral code with someone.
HQ gave every user a referral code and if someone signed up using it, you would get an extra life.
As the cash prizes increased, the incentive to get extra lives increased, and the likelihood that users shared their referral code increased.
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Creating a positive feedback loop that resulted in a peak viewership of 2.4M people on their live stream.
As quick as their rise to fame was, their fall to the depths was even quicker.
HQ failed for one simple reason. They didn’t listen to their users.
A big factor in their initial success was the cash prizes that participants could win, starting at $5 when they launched to $400,000 at their peak.
But slowly users grew annoyed with HQ’s unreliable live stream quality and extremely long money transfers.
So when you won your $5.07 in yesterday’s trivia, it would take months to see it in your bank account. This posed a huge hurdle for HQ, yet they ignored it.
Instead of investing in areas that their users wanted to see improvement in, they solely invested in increasing the cash prizes of their live streams.
Users just wanted a better CX (no lagging livestream) and a streamlined money transfer process (who wants to wait weeks for their $5 in winnings??).
Just because a strategy gets you to a certain point of success, doesn’t mean that it is the answer moving forward.
The cash prizes got HQ from 0 to 1, but they were unable to get from 1 to 10 because they simply didn’t absorb customer feedback or even open a medium for the feedback.
