The Savvy Diaries, Vol 1: Go-Go Gadget Game Show!
What you missed in TextSavvy's pre-season — and what's coming tonight
With the Savvy cat starting to scratch its way out of the bag and awareness steadily growing around my return to the “vertical screen,” I thought I’d share some of my unmediated, fully unexpurgated thoughts — directly with you, my faithful RML subscriber. Welcome to The Savvy Diaries.
Tonight is the Season One Premiere of TextSavvy — a live, interactive mobile game show of word puzzles airing on school nights (Sunday-Thursday) at 9p Eastern on the Savvy app.
I’m a co-founder of the app — which we can confidently say is the world’s only mobile gaming platform for live-hosted, two-way interactive game shows — and the host of its flagship offering, TextSavvy.1
What does all of this mean for you? It means you can download the Savvy app and not merely watch our Wordle-inspired game show — but actively participate in it as a real-time contestant.
As I shared with my friend Noah Kalina who recently interviewed me for his fabulous newsletter, I like to think of Savvy as a radical experiment in making phones fun again. We’re doing our best to create a safe space for attention, intention, and human connection in a world engineered for outrage, addiction, and isolation. You don’t dissociatively scroll Savvy; you show up for it. You don’t mindlessly binge it; you bring it. We’re a twenty-minute shot of functional screen time — where neurons are fed, not fried; where brains are refueled, not rotted.
We’re also giving away free money.
If you miss HQ Trivia, like playing word puzzles, and love winning cash, then you’re gonna lose your socks over Savvy (available for both Apple and Android). Download the free app — knowing you’re protected by our 100% no-hassle, money-back guarantee — and tune into a show sometime. Preferably, tonight! What else could you possibly be doing on a Sunday evening?
If you’re wondering how this all came together — how the “Quiz Daddy” wound up back on your phone hosting a new game, with a new nickname (“Puzzle Papi”), nearly a decade after that fateful first HQ broadcast went live to an audience of fifty-odd curious viewers that quickly swelled into the millions, reshaped the global media landscape, and turned an unknown comedian into an overnight sensation — well, I already kinda told that story in a previous post. Will give you a moment to catch up.
TL;DR: it started with a DM, which led to an incorporation, which resulted in rollout of our beta app in October. On that very first beta show on October 16, 2025, streaming live from a million-dollar Manhattan studio I had secured gratis in a savvy bartering arrangement, we draw a little more than 700 participants. On our final beta show on January 29, 2026, streaming live from Forever Dog Studios in Los Angeles (yes, I moved the show — any myself — across the country to make this work), we reached a little less than 1500 total viewers. On our show last Thursday — what we called our Season 0 Finale — we set a new record with a peak of over 4500 concurrently connected devices.
200% growth in our first official month? We’ll take it!
A Note on “Season 0”
The team had set a deadline to exit beta at the end of January and officially launch on February 1st. As the “alpha premiere” date approached, I simply didn’t feel we were ready for our close-up. I had just moved back to LA on January 27th, giving us time to run only one test show in our new studio set-up before Feb. 1. We had also just pushed a new update for the app, opening the game up to Android users for the first time. As with all new updates — especially one involving the onboarding of an entirely new OS client base — we were bound to experience some bugs and glitches. Hoping to have any production and development issues ironed out in about a month, the four Savvy co-founders came to the fun compromise of starting with a “Season 0” — partially inspired by the “Issue 0” comic books I used to collect.
You’re likely familiar with the acronym “MVP” from the world of sports, meaning “Most Valuable Player.” If you’re a cardiologist, maybe “Mitral Valve Prolapse” jumps to mind. Fans of the blaxploitation film genre might think of “Melvin Van Peebles.” The tech world has its own variant: “Minimum Viable Product,” which in and of itself means: the earliest version of a product that can be taken to market. For most software and hardware, the MVP is fairly objective in scope: it can perform its most basic functions without breaking.
In the world of entertainment media (and art, more broadly), there is no such concept as an MVP. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. When producing a song, or film, or TV show, the product is deemed “finished” and ready for the public consumption when the producer has exerted maximum resources and resolve towards the project — oftentimes going way over what was originally budgeted, in order to finish the job. And until it’s done, it’s not seeing the light of day. A song isn’t released before its chorus has been added, and the recordings have been mixed and mastered. A movie doesn’t open in theaters without a third act, or its title sequence and end credits. A TV show doesn’t air without its soundtrack.
With a “product” like a human-hosted, live-streamed, interactive mobile game show that straddles the unique axis of technology and media, that blends art and science, that squares the quantitative with the qualitative, the concept of an MVP can be wildly subjective. In designing and developing TextSavvy, the question our team keeps asking but can’t quite answer is: when is it finished? When are we “ready”?
The truth is, we are very far from where we ultimately want to be with this thing. If I were to honestly assess it, based on my vision for this singular game show experience, I’d say we’re only halfway there. But at the same, we’re certainly good enough, and I’m extremely proud of the work our team has poured into Savvy so far.
The clock just struck 4pm in LA. I have to walk the dog, get dressed, and get to the studio early tonight, to prepare for our special guest and test the new intro and animations my friend and true savant Russell Wyner made for Season One. I must sign off for now, but please stay following along as much more is to come with these diary entries — and with Savvy.
Here’s to sucking the marrow out of life,
Scott
Many more formats are in development! Stay tuned!