When Icelandic developer Thorsteinn Fridriksson unleashed QuizUp on the world in late 2013, the last thing he expected was that the trivia app’s questions would turn into the nerdy equivalent of Cupid’s arrows. However, a surprising number of people who fell in love with the app also fell in love with each other.
“Very soon after we launched, we started hearing about people connecting on the platform,” Fridriksson told Cult of Mac. “You’d be amazed at how many QuizUp couples there are — people who literally met each other because they shared interests in the game.”
Now QuizUp is poised to pivot, taking advantage of its innate ability to connect players — whether for love, friendship or just a killer trivia smackdown. Today’s update marks the biggest and riskiest change in QuizUp’s history, as the multiple-choice game relaunches with a new focus on social networking.
Crazily enough, it just might work.
While change is always dangerous for apps and website — think Digg’s disastrous redesign or Foursquare’s unwise decision to spin off Swarm — QuizUp’s evolution seems organic and in tune with the way its users already interact.
With more than 35 million registered users and a billion game matches during its lifetime, QuizUp certainly has a big enough customer base to give players a good chance of meeting a like-minded person.
More importantly, however, is one of the key ingredients that helped earn QuizUp the title of fastest-growing iPhone game in history: The sheer number of its trivia categories, currently around 1,200, tends to attract superfans ready for a deep dive into a particular topic.
“Instead of users playing just ‘Entertainment’ as a whole, they might play Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, their favorite authors or whatever,” Fridriksson said. “This means that you get far more passionate fans in each category. We wanted a way to harness that.”
Outside of straightforward dating tools, remarkably few apps offer a way to make new friends, Fridriksson said.
“Facebook is about interacting with people you already know,” he said. “If you get a friend request from a person you have no other friends in common with, it’s kind of creepy. We wondered if we could make a platform that would make it intuitive and easy to start to communicate with other people you don’t know, based on shared interests.”
QuizUp’s redesign retains the focus on competitive trivia games, but adds the ability to follow topics and people that interest you, offering targeted newsfeeds and giving enthusiastic fans a place to post news, comments and photos.
“If a person posts a selfie of themselves with one of the actors from Game of Thrones on their Facebook page, it may get a few dozen likes,” Fridriksson noted. “If you post that on our Game of Thrones feed, you’ll get thousands of likes.”
Users can also look at one another’s profiles, discover people with shared interests, and then challenge them to trivia games as a way of breaking the ice.
It’s also possible to search for users by categories like interests, gender and age. For example, you might search for a male user between the ages of 25 and 35 who likes Mad Men, Batman and pro wrestling.
Against the odds
Fridriksson knows his company, Plain Vanilla Corp, is gambling by making changes to its popular app.
“This is a risky move on our part,” Fridriksson said. “Popular wisdom tells you not to change something that’s working. Instead of incrementally changing QuizUp — which is a very successful game — we’re really going back to the drawing board.”
Perhaps QuizUp’s fairy-tale rise to the top of the trivia heap has something to do with his stomach for risk. It’s an against-the-odds story that wouldn’t look out of place on the big screen.
In 2012, Fridriksson was close to bankrupt. A former TV presenter, he had completed an MBA at the prestigious University of Oxford and moved back home to Iceland, ready to conquer the world. Except things hadn’t worked out.
He had returned during one of the worst financial downturns in history, and companies weren’t hiring — not even MBAs. So he set up an app company called Plain Vanilla Games, and poured his time and energy into a mobile title aimed at kids called The Moogies.
It sank like a stone.
“We spent over a year developing it, and it came out and was just this enormous failure,” Fridriksson said. “No one bought it.”
At his lowest ebb, Fridriksson was in a bar, contemplating how best to fold his company. Talking with a friend, he commented that he was surprised nobody had found a way to translate the board game Trivial Pursuit into an app the way people had done with Pictionary and Scrabble.
Asked how this might work, he started scribbling on the back of a napkin. By the time he was finished he had sketched the concept for QuizUp.
Photo: Thor Fredriksson
Fridriksson spent the next few months in San Francisco, unsuccessfully trying to sell venture capitalists on the concept. “In my imagination, all the VCs would be throwing money at this great idea,” he said. “As it turned out, that wasn’t the right assumption at all.”
He eventually caught a break when he convinced the movie studio behind tween vampire juggernaut Twilight to hire him to create a branded trivia app that would let fans of the franchise compete head-to-head.
“They agreed, and to my amazement I had the intellectual property rights to the biggest movie of 2012,” he says.
Having demonstrated that there was an audience for the idea, Fridriksson raised more venture funding, and QuizUp was finally off to the races.
Photo: Plain Vanilla Games
“I explain the app’s success as relating to people’s primal need to demonstrate that they’re good at something,” he said. “QuizUp is one of the most heavily shared games ever. That’s because people like to show off their achievements online. If they’re the most knowledgeable person about a topic in their area, they want people to know. Users are passionate about these subjects; it’s a big part of who they are as people.”
Today QuizUp is gaining 30,000 new users each day, mainly through word of mouth. The app has raised more than $26 million from VCs and topped the App Store in 130 different countries. As games go, it also has an extraordinary engagement rate: Players will frequently spend an average of 25 minutes per day playing.
Whether this can translate into the next Facebook remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a fascinating prospect.
“It’s a risk, definitely, but it’s one I believe in,” Fridriksson said. “If this works, there’s the potential for QuizUp to become a daily habit for people. They’ll log on to check out the latest things that are happening in whatever they’re interested in. It’s the natural evolution for what we’re doing.”
