Business
Masters of Trivia: Unlock Your Knowledge, Elevate Your Game
Masters of Trivia is a quiz platform where players earn rewards, including gift cards, while allowing advertisers to hyper-target niche audiences with clickthrough and conversion rates 30x industry norms. The platform’s founder, Dom Einhorn, launched it amidst personal legal battles in France, where he is now seeking justice after wrongful political persecution and asset seizures.
No one ever said that trivia quizzes could change the world. But, as it turns out, one new trivia quiz platform may well come exceptionally close. Masters of Trivia, a platform best described as a sort of “Wikipedia for Quizzes” is fast proving that the humble trivia quiz may not be so humble after all.
For the players themselves, the Masters of Trivia proposition is simple — take trivia quizzes and turn their knowledge into tangible rewards, including gift cards and other unique prizes. And while anyone is welcome to unleash their competitive side and attempt to conquer the trivia quiz leaderboards, becoming a “winner” in the traditional sense isn’t a prerequisite. Even the most casual trivia quiz taker can still walk away a winner, with the only requirement to earning rewards being to engage with the platform to earn coins, whether that be by taking quizzes directly, or by referring players to sign up via the iPhone app, the Android app, or directly via the web version.
Advertisers are reaping major rewards, too, with the Masters of Trivia platform introducing one of the more meaningful contextual advertising innovations seen in quite some time. Once again, the proposition is relatively simple. By taking out sponsorship packages for select quizzes, advertisers can niche down and tap directly into hyper-focused audiences. For example, health food and supplement companies might target users taking fitness quizzes. Already, this innovation is showing clickthrough and conversion rates as high as 30x industry averages.
However, while players and advertisers are winning daily, perhaps the biggest impact Masters of Trivia has had has been on the life of its founder, Dom Einhorn. For Einhorn, a serial entrepreneur with numerous exits already under his belt, Masters of Trivia is about so much more than just another business success. Ultimately, it represents hope in the midst of a personal battle against a deep web of corruption he has found himself the victim of in France.
Masters of Trivia: A New Hope for Einhorn
In February 2022, Einhorn found himself entangled in a deep web of corruption after he was wrongfully indicted in France on a laundry list of unfounded and increasingly bizarre charges. The origins of this ordeal date back to the rise of Einhorn’s last — and perhaps most audacious — entrepreneurial venture, the Uniqorn tech incubator.
What made the Uniqorn incubator so audacious in particular was where Einhorn chose to found it — Sarlat-la-Canéda, a small French tourist town deep in the country’s southwestern countryside. Given the unusual location, nobody, except Einhorn and a few close supporters, expected anything to come from it, leaving many taken by surprise when the incubator started gathering momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic. This, however, wasn’t the only surprise.
Hidden behind the incubator’s success was a growing story of political jealousy. Originally attracted to Sarlat by promises made to him by the town’s Mayor, Jean-Jacques de Peretti, Einhorn had since shifted political camps after one too many of those promises went broken. For Peretti, Einhorn had become a major threat, and thus ensued a smear campaign perpetuating rumors that eventually resulted in an indictment.
The consequences of the indictment for Einhorn have been nigh-on catastrophic, with most of his personal assets seized and his businesses liquidated after being placed in judicial administration. This was despite a recent court ruling finding that there were no reasonable grounds to justify these seizures.
Three years on, and despite numerous court rulings in Einhorn’s favor, this wrongful indictment has yet to be resolved. Most recently, a court ruling ordering the restitution of Einhorn’s seized funds has gone ignored by the administrative body tasked with guarding those funds.
Faced with such adversity, many entrepreneurs find themselves spiraling into the darkest depths of depression. Apesa, an association providing psychological support to entrepreneurs facing similar judicial liquidations in France, is said to have saved as many as 7000 such entrepreneurs from the brink of suicide in the last 10 years. Einhorn, however, refused to back down. Instead, he sought new hope through somewhat of a return to his entrepreneurial roots.
Einhorn’s return to his roots was, in part, a matter of necessity. Due to judicial restrictions, he was prohibited from directing a company within French territory. As a result, he officially shifted his entrepreneurial focus back to the United States, where his career first flourished, by founding his new company there. However, this wasn’t just an administrative move. His latest venture, the Masters of Trivia quiz platform, is actually a revival of an idea he had set aside fifteen years earlier.
Old Ideas, New Perspectives: The Secrets to Masters of Trivia’s Success
Many things have changed in the years since Einhorn first toyed with the idea of a trivia quiz platform. Fifteen years ago, when Einhorn first tried his hand at building Masters of Trivia, both he and the internet were in vastly different places.
Since his first iteration of Masters of Trivia, Einhorn has learned a lot about engaging and retaining audiences as it applies to building gamified consumer apps. This has come through both personal experience, and by drawing on the numerous learnings that have come out of the broader mobile gaming community, like building meaningful reward mechanisms to drive ongoing engagement.
The technology powering the internet in general, and mobile gaming in particular, has also seen dramatic changes. At the time, both were still in their infancy, with much of the web still reliant on clunky full-page refreshes and other hindrances to creating a seamless gaming experience. The iPhone was also still in its infancy, having been released just months before Einhorn launched Masters of Trivia. At that time, the “killer” mobile apps were heavily geared towards calendars, email, and other productivity use cases more than they were for gaming, which wouldn’t truly arrive for a number of years.
As with many ideas, the initial failure of the initial iteration of Masters of Trivia to take off seemed to be more a case of bad timing and suboptimal execution than it was a case of a fundamentally flawed idea. And, if the first two months since the platform relaunched in 2024 are any indication, this time, Einhorn nailed both the execution, and the timing.
To date, Masters of Trivia has already been downloaded over 200,000 times across both Android and iOS, with the web app attracting tens of thousands more direct sign-ups. Engagement rates and repeat players have also been ticking up steadily during this time as the Masters of Trivia team continues tweaking the application, with perhaps the biggest uptick coming from mobile app user response to increasingly targeted push notifications.
Now, Einhorn’s next milestone will be to grow Masters of Trivia to half a million active users as a proof of concept to both advertisers and potential investors of the platform’s immense scalability.
From Trivia Quizzes to Hunger Strikes: Einhorn’s Latest Venture
With renewed optimism from the early success he’s had with Masters of Trivia, Einhorn now believes he can parlay this momentum into something much more personal. After being stuck in legal limbo for the better part of three years, he’s now seeking long-overdue justice. Last month, in a final act of defiance, Einhorn launched a hunger strike to bring attention to the politically motivated charges that continue to be held against him.
Initially, attempts were made to sweep the hunger strike under the carpet in the hopes Einhorn’s stunt would go unnoticed. And, at first, these attempts were successful. While today he may present himself as the humble mayor of a small village, the central figure in Einhorn’s affair, Jean-Jacques de Peretti, had more than a few strings to pull on. As a former senior advisor to Jacques Chirac, and a central figure in the Elf Scandal — the largest political corruption case ever seen in France — Peretti’s network runs deep, right down to the instructing magistrate in the investigation, Lydie Bagonneau.
However, Einhorn persisted in his strike, and slowly but surely, a growing base of supporters for his battle finally brought some light to the end of the tunnel. An emergency hearing in Paris was finally being granted. Scheduled for September 16, 2024, Einhorn’s only hope is to receive a fair judgment based on the facts of his case and bring about an end to his years of victimization on the basis of political jealousy and rumors.
Einhorn’s Future with Masters of Trivia
While Einhorn’s hunger strike has inevitably put a damper on the rate of progress being made on Masters of Trivia — a recent doctor’s report details declining health and mental acuity — his resolve remains as strong as ever. Come rain hail or shine, Einhorn is determined to see Masters of Trivia hit its full potential.
Ultimately, Einhorn’s vision for the Masters of Trivia platform extends well beyond the current, early success. Long term, he sees it becoming a global platform with an ever-growing trivia base, an increasingly refined advertising model, and, perhaps most importantly, a flourishing community of engaged trivia players hooked by their love of learning and the platform’s slick trivia gamification.
Achieving this, of course, won’t be without its challenges. Notably, continued delays in achieving justice in his case will likely prolong Einhorn’s hunger strike. And while his pending hearing may offer some hope, past experience has taught Einhorn not to allow his hopes to get too high. The refusal by French administrators to even acknowledge the court ruling ordering the restitution of his seized assets stands as a sordid case in point.
With that said and whatever the outcome may be, Einhorn expects to have a much easier time on other fronts. The commitment to consistently growing the platform’s trivia base stands as one example. Incidentally, the comparisons made between the platform and Wikipedia — the “Wikipedia for Quizzes” — offer some explanation here. As of January 2024, Wikipedia is still growing by 14,000 articles a month, suggesting Masters of Trivia still has a long way to go before exhausting the world’s knowledge in its endless pursuit of trivia questions.
Einhorn also expects to have a relatively easy time selling the platform to would-be advertisers, although this will depend on building initial traction with a smaller group of early adopters. While the fundamental mechanics of Masters of Trivia’s hyper-targeted model are relatively simple to comprehend, selling businesses on new advertising models can be a tough sell until social proof and word of mouth kick in.
But for the rest of us, there’s little need to wait and see. While it’s still early days, Masters of Trivia is available to play right now, with the only thing standing between here and hours of trivia fun is a simple registration to play. Download now for iPhone, Android, or sign up directly via the web version today.
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(Featured image courtesy of Masters of Trivia)
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