10 things you (probably) never knew about SpeedQuizzing!

It’s our birthday today (11th November) – and not just any old anniversary either!

Today marks 10 years since SpeedQuizzing was ‘officially’ launched as a limited company – and what a ride it has been!

From very humble beginnings based in our co-founder’s kitchen around 2006, things have really taken off, with over 1,500 SpeedQuizzing events taking place every week all over the world!

We never set out to ‘go global’ – to be honest, at the start, we didn’t have aspirations that stretched too far outside of our home city of York.

But it has been incredible to see how things have grown since then. And that is down, in a very big way, to our thousands of loyal customers who have shown us huge support over the last decade, whether they’ve been hosting or taking part in a SpeedQuiz. Thank you to everyone who has helped and supported us, it’s hugely appreciated – and here’s to the next 10 years!

To mark this 10-year anniversary, it’s customary to get a gift of tin – but with all the shortages these days, we’re struggling to get a chicken, let alone tin. So, instead, we’re making do with a nice cake and a cup of tea (and maybe some beers)! We know SpeedQuizzing fans love a good fact too, so we thought it would be nice to mark our anniversary by sharing 10 facts you (probably) never knew about us!

1. The idea for SpeedQuizzing was born out of a desire to stop cheating in pub quizzes. As keen quizzers, our co-founders, Alan and John, were becoming increasingly frustrated at the rising levels of cheating occurring in pub quizzes, with cheats consulting encyclopaedias stashed away in their cars or making sneaky phone calls in pub toilets with their Nokia 3310s! In true pioneer style, Alan and John set about trying to tackle the issue…….and came up with the concept that ultimately became SpeedQuizzing.
2. The year is 2006. There’s no such thing as the iPhone yet, Facebook is only available to students, Gnarls Barkley is dominating the charts with ‘Crazy’ and, for some unfathomable reason, a lot of people are downloading a ridiculously annoying Crazy Frog ringtone (remember that?). It was also a milestone year for us, with the FIRST EVER SpeedQuiz event taking place in the upstairs lounge of the Royal Oak in York (five years before we became an officially registered company).
3. SpeedQuizzing was NEVER a pen and paper quiz, but the ‘smartest smartphone quiz there is’ wasn’t immediately played using smartphones either – with Radio Frequency buzzers (they were hi-tech then!) provided for players to use in the early days.
4. We’ve always been a family-run business. SpeedQuizzing was officially started by brothers Alan and John Leach in 2011 and, 10 years on, it’s still very much a family affair, with six of our 12 strong team hailing from the Leach family!
5. There are a lot more than just the 12 of us in reality though, with over 1,000 active SpeedQuizzing hosts, based all over the world, running our fast-paced quizzes every week.
6. And when we say all over the world, we mean all over the world! SpeedQuizzing is hosted and played in over 40 countries, with the most southerly regular event taking place in Queenstown, New Zealand, while at the opposite end of the globe, the most northerly event is played up in Sweden!
7. To date, our platform and app has been used to host and play well over 200,000 quizzes since 2011. If each quiz lasted approximately 90 minutes, this equates to 12,500 days of constant quizzing – that’s just over 34 years!
8. That much quizzing takes A LOT of questions – but that’s fine, we’ve got it covered! 1,500 new questions are written by our in-house crack-team of question writers every month, and there are currently over 130,000 ‘live’ questions in our database that are available to be downloaded in our digital question packs. And if we did ever run out (don’t worry, it will never happen), our hosts are on it as well, writing 2.5 million questions between them over the last 10 years for use in their own bespoke events.
9. Ever been to a SpeedQuizzing event and thought you recognised someone off the telly? Well, you may just have been right! Notable fans of SpeedQuizzing include The Chase star Paul Sinha (who also contributes to our question packs), Star Trek legend and space voyager William Shatner, and chart-topping singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi.
10. It’s not just in-venue quizzing that we’re known for now, either. We created our online version, SQ Live, in March 2020 and since then it has been used to host well over 100,000 virtual quizzes, involving an estimated 1,000,000 players. But a little-known fact that you might not be aware of is that we created and launched it all in the space of about two weeks – rushing it through so we could support the struggling hospitality industry at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

If you’re interested in finding out more about just how easy it is to host a SpeedQuiz using our industry-leading platform, we’d love to hear from you. And if you’re a quizzer who wants to attend one of 1,500+ SpeedQuizzing events taking place across the world every week, you can find out more here.