Changing careers can feel intimidating at any stage of life, but for many people, taking that risk leads to a more rewarding path. Darin Hawley, founder and creator of Huge Quiz, is one example of someone who turned a personal interest into a growing digital business.
Huge Quiz is a Minneapolis-based quiz game website that Hawley launched in 2015. As the platform continues to expand, we spoke with him about leaving finance, building an online quiz business, working independently, and the lessons he has learned as an entrepreneur.
Meet Huge Quiz Founder Darin Hawley
Work and Money: I understand that you began your career in finance. Can you tell us how you moved from that field into entrepreneurship?
Darin Hawley: Sure. I have lived in the Minneapolis area for most of my life. I grew up in Plymouth and attended the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where I studied business with an emphasis in finance.
After college, I mainly worked in finance, focusing on stocks, bonds, and investments. My longest role before starting Huge Quiz was at the Royal Bank of Canada, where I worked for a little over a decade. At the same time, I had always been interested in technology. Over the years, I taught myself about computers and basic programming. That background helped me build the foundation for the website.
WM: What made you choose trivia quizzes as the focus of your business?
Hawley: At my previous job, some days were extremely busy and others were very quiet. During trading hours, we could not really step away from the computer, so on slower days I would look for something online to keep myself occupied.
There is a well-known quiz website called Sporcle that has a huge number of quizzes, and one of the best things about it is that users can create their own. I started making quizzes there, but mine were usually more involved than the standard format. For example, they often had many more answers or required more data to build.
Over time, I became one of the more popular quiz makers on the site. Eventually, I thought I could expand on the idea. I wanted to create quizzes that used features like Google Maps, rather than simply asking users to name places from text clues. I also wanted to make quizzes without strict limits on the number of answers.
The goal was to create something people could spend more time on. Instead of a short trivia quiz with 10 or 20 answers, I wanted Huge Quiz to feel more like a brainstorming challenge.
WM: I tried one of your music quizzes and liked that it included an actual piece of music in the question.
Hawley: Most quizzes are based on typing answers from text hints, but some of the quizzes on Huge Quiz use audio. In the geography section, there are map quizzes where users see a Google map with pins and have to name the locations. Those features make the experience more interactive.
WM: How do you create the quizzes?
Hawley: Most of them are built from large sets of data. I am constantly gathering data online, and I have become good at automating that process. I am not manually copying and pasting everything.
For example, if I create a quiz about the largest cities in the world, I find reliable sources that list city populations. One useful site for that kind of information is City Population. I have written scripts that open pages from data sources and pull information into Excel. From there, I can build a large spreadsheet with city names, coordinates, populations, and other details.
The quizzes then read from that data set. With one data set, I can create a quiz about the largest cities in the world, the largest cities in Asia, or the largest cities that begin with a specific letter. If a user enters the letter “A,” the quiz can display all the cities beginning with that letter on the map, and the user has to name them.
WM: Are you the only person creating quizzes and managing the site?
Hawley: Most of the time, yes. Occasionally, someone who uses the site will email me with a quiz suggestion or send data, but that is fairly rare. The biggest area where I had help was the website itself. A few years ago, I worked with a freelance web developer over several months to redesign the site. In 2018, we worked on the full design, including the back end, front end, and user experience.
The first version of Huge Quiz launched in 2015 while I was still working at RBC, and at that point it was more of a hobby. About a year later, I left to spend more time on the site, although it remained a side project for a while. For income, I did a lot of freelance programming, which I still do, but now that work takes a back seat to Huge Quiz. The site has become nearly full-time for me.
Over the last six months, I have reduced my freelance workload and focused more on partnerships and the business side of the website.
WM: Do you run ads on the site?
Hawley: No, I do not use ads. I am not a big fan of them. Instead, Huge Quiz has a membership option for players. Members get twice as much time on quizzes and can see more of the answers they missed. After finishing a quiz, they also get access to a statistics page. Memberships are available for three months, six months, one year, or a lifetime.
WM: It is also useful that players can see top scores on the site.
Hawley: I like Sporcle, but I do not think it offers that same kind of option. I have tried to focus a lot on statistics and give players goals to aim for.
WM: Huge Quiz has a presence on Twitter and Facebook. Is that how most people discover the site?
Hawley: Right now, most traffic comes from organic search. The site has been around long enough that it appears on the first or second page of some Google searches.
I also occasionally run ads on sites like Reddit and a few others. Social media posts and shares bring in some traffic as well.
WM: What are the biggest advantages and disadvantages of running the site yourself?
Hawley: The biggest advantage is control. I make the decisions and do not have to get approval from anyone. It is entirely my project. The downside is that I also do all the work. If I want something done, I do not have an employee to handle it. If there is a site issue, I deal with it myself.
Fortunately, the site runs smoothly. It has very little downtime and a strong hosting setup. I understand enough about the back end of websites to fix almost everything. Another benefit is that if I have an idea, I can implement it quickly. I do not have to wait.
WM: How many quizzes do you add each week?
Hawley: Each week, I focus on two things: creating new quizzes and updating existing ones. I try to make many of the quizzes “live,” meaning they update automatically.
For example, if I have a baseball quiz about the top 100 hitters of all time and a player enters the top 100 after a game, I have small programs that run overnight and update the data based on the previous day’s games. I do not have to manually add that player the next morning. He will simply appear in the quiz.
That is not possible for every quiz. Some quizzes are updated once a year, such as one based on Fortune 500 companies. In those cases, I gather the new data and add it manually. Usually, a handful of quizzes are updated every week with fresh information.
As for new quizzes, I try to publish between five and twelve each week, Monday through Friday. I may work on things over the weekend, but I generally treat it like a regular workweek.
WM: How do you see Huge Quiz developing over the next five years?
Hawley: I would really like to grow partnerships. I also want to hire an employee soon, but that depends on how much the site grows. I would like to see the audience expand significantly. Those are my main goals.
Huge Quiz is moderately popular now, but I want it to become much larger. I am continually working to improve the quality of the site and add more content. Eventually, I would love to collaborate with a major media company, such as IMDb for movie quizzes or ESPN for sports quizzes. I am always trying to connect with people at larger companies that have strong media presences.
WM: What advice would you give to new entrepreneurs who want to start their own business?
Hawley: It sounds like a cliché when people say, “Do not give up,” but it is true. Not long ago, Huge Quiz was much smaller than it is today. It started as a hobby and a basic website that I built myself without help from a developer. It looked much more amateur, but I stayed with it. If you create enough good content, people will eventually find you and begin following what you are doing.
Another thing I have focused on more in recent months is user engagement. I think it is important to let people know that you are present and that you will respond if they have questions. Users contact me through the site, and I try to reply quickly.
I also created an Instagram page to give away memberships once a month, encourage people to follow the site, and create more ways for users to stay connected. I update the main page with quizzes of the week to keep people engaged.
Content is king. Having 100 quizzes is much better than having 10, but quality matters too. I try not to create quizzes that very few people would be interested in. For example, a quiz about the 10 greatest soccer players from Kazakhstan might appeal to a small group, but probably not to many users.
I focus on quizzes that a broad audience will enjoy, or at least that people interested in a specific topic will appreciate. Some quizzes I expected to perform poorly ended up becoming very popular, while others I thought would do well did not get many plays. You really do not know until you publish them. My advice is to keep coming up with ideas and keep testing them.
Want to test your knowledge? Explore the quiz games from Huge Quiz.