TL;DR - Trivia Night is live! Send me feedback, and be sure to use code EARLYBIRD if you buy anything.

If you've been following along with my recent monthly reviews, you'll know I've been hard at work building a platform to host virtual trivia nights. I'm proud to say that I'm finally done with the first version of the site and am officially launching it to the public! If you haven't been following along, here's the full story:

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was bored, stuck at home, and looking for a source of happiness during a pretty dark time. As a spur of the moment decision, I decided to send out an email to everyone I knew inviting them to a night of pub-style trivia hosted by me over Zoom. Shockingly, more than 40 people came out and played that night, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

Afterwards, in a fit of enthusiasm, I naively boldly declared that I would host weekly trivia for "as long as I can keep up." That ended up being an entire year, at the end of which I decided to switch to a more reasonable monthly schedule.

Now, just about two years after that first game, I've learned a few things:

• Trivia is a great way to stay connected. Most of the teams that still play consistently are made up of friends or family that live all across the country. I've heard from them that trivia is an ideal way to stay in touch, because it provides an activity to keep everyone occupied, but also has enough downtime for conversation.
• Nothing can replace the experience of in-person trivia, but virtual has a few perks of its own. You can eat whatever you want. The beer is free. You don't have to worry about other teams stealing your answers. Most importantly, with the right video platform, the addition of text chat adds an opportunity for team-to-team communication (trash-talk) that's mostly missing from the real-life version.
• Writing a good trivia question is an art. After a particularly hard round, some of my teams might respond to this by telling me to go back to art school, but I think I've learned a lot over the course of the 2,500 questions I've written. I strive to make every question into a puzzle with a satisfying payoff. No one should ever feel cheated by an answer, and even if the subject matter is trivial, I hope people come away having learned something interesting.

With strong feelings on the topic of trivia and a lot of recently-acquired free time, I decided to put these lessons to use by building my ideal platform for virtual trivia. Having participated in supremely mediocre trivia nights as team-builders at work, I decided that corporate events were my first target market. I wanted to make it easy to create a high-quality trivia experience for groups, which means offering two products:

1. A low-cost, DIY experience that gives you the tools to look like a professional host.
2. A higher-priced package that handles everything for you. I'll customize the experience for the customer and take care of every aspect of hosting. They just have to show up.

While there are a million improvements I'd still like to make, the first version of a site that supports these two models is live today. I'd love if you check it out:

If readers of this site have any feedback (seriously, any), or questions on how to use it, feel free to email me at dan@danwaters.org or contact support@trivianight.fun.

And if anyone is interested in using the site to host a round of trivia, make sure to use code EARLYBIRD for 50% off your first game!

Thanks for reading!