Kalshi's New Strategy: Retaining Users with VIP Program

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00:00Yeah, Kalshi's done a good job of getting a lot of new people to download their app,

00:04deposit some money, and make some predictions. But what is the focus beyond that?

00:10Yeah, it's a great way to look at this. There's been a ton of growth. It's similar,

00:15we're seeing, to prediction markets, what we saw to sportsbooks when they first came in and

00:19kind of took the country by storm, acquiring all these new users with incentives and bonuses.

00:25And now you have Kalshi kind of moving into that realm of things where now they are trying to

00:31retain all the great customers that have signed up and used the product and make sure they're

00:36really here to stay as opposed to kind of being a fad, which is really important when you talk

00:41about prediction markets, which are fundamentally different than sportsbooks. Kalshi announcing

00:45this week, it's going to have a VIP program, which is going to be essentially for its top users that

00:51it wants to retain, where it's going to be very similar to what sportsbooks have, where you have

00:56kind of a direct line of customer support day and night to make sure that everything is going smooth

01:02for the biggest customers they want to retain. For sportsbooks, these are their biggest programs.

01:07These are where they kind of make all their money, is keeping these big kind of whales as they're

01:12known. So Kalshi, interesting following with kind of a similar move here. And it's really important

01:17from the standpoint to the prediction markets right now need a lot of liquidity. It's great to

01:22be able to offer all these markets on things that sportsbooks can't, be in states where sportsbooks

01:27have not been able to get to right now. But if no one is on the other side of these markets, a lot of

01:32the time, you're not going to attract and keep the big bettors that you kind of want to take away

01:38from sportsbooks. So you can kind of look at this as a move of improving the liquidity that Kalshi has on

01:43its platform, as well as kind of preparing for incoming competition. We know FanDuel and DraftKings

01:49have launched their own prediction markets as well. So they'll be competing in states where

01:53Kalshi so far has really only had to compete with Coinbase and a few other small prediction markets,

01:59Polymarket not fully back launched yet. So it's kind of a new pivot for the main prediction market

02:06here going into 2026. Last year was obviously all about launching, getting off the ground, having tons

02:11of volume. As you mentioned, Craig, a lot of app downloads as well. Now it's the how do we make

02:18this long term? How do we last? How do we keep these customers? Not just from a standpoint of is

02:24regulation coming? Are we going to be legal? But what happens when the rest of the industry catches

02:28up to us as well? So I would imagine there'd be similar kind of moves Kalshi and others make

02:32throughout the year signaling that now they're kind of going to try to focus on customer retention

02:37as opposed to going out and grabbing market share.