With our latest Affiliate Q&A, we spoke to Kevin Jing, CFO at HotTakes, about all things affiliate marketing! We spoke about the growth of iGaming in North America, how to educate new users and much more.
Income Access (IA): Thanks for speaking with us Kevin! Can you tell us a bit about your background in the iGaming industry and current role at HotTakes?
Kevin Jing (KJ): Of course! My co-founders (Tyler and James) and I were all passionate sports fans and best friends in university when we saw many of our friends getting into sports betting without education on the lingo or responsible behaviors. We decided to innovate on that and created HotTakes.
Personally, my background is in traditional finance and data roles, and I currently serve as CFO at HotTakes as well as overseeing Product and Data.
IA: You have a very engaging app product for sports lovers. What makes it unique in comparison to similar apps in the iGaming industry?
KJ: The app was completely designed by sports fans with our users in mind. We monetize through a unique model that allows us to reward users for making sports picks, without ever interrupting their experience through advertisements. What we offer is a pure free-to-play app for sports picking and a unique streak-based rewards model that is exhilarating and engaging. We were very excited to bring a completely redesigned app to both Canada and the US in early 2025, where we are expanding the picking capabilities and user experience greatly while keeping our model the same: Make Free Picks, Win Real Prizes.
IA: Your team operates in the Canadian market. What are the challenges for this market and how do you look to overcome them?
KJ: Canadian users are very concentrated geographically and quite homogenous in their preferences. Furthermore, with almost half of Canadians residing in Ontario and Sports Betting becoming legalized over two years ago, we're starting to see saturation and first-movers advantage taking place. For one, large operators that were able to put significant spend into marketing from the get-go are enjoying the stickiness of their users, which makes our job as an affiliate difficult in convincing our users to try out our partner brands.
Furthermore, Ontario operates under different marketing regulatory guidelines for iGaming than other US states. We continue to adapt and tailor our product to best fit our Canadian users' needs and are positioned well to expand into other provinces in Canada as iGaming becomes legal and regulated in those markets.
IA: You are planning to extend to the US market in the near future. What would be your strategy to bring in more valuable traffic from US?
KJ: Referrals are king in the traffic game, which we noticed in Canada as well. A user who is very engaged with our product, logs in every day and is an avid sports fan will likely have a similar network of close friends around them. We encourage our users to tap into their networks by offering direct rewards for referrals to our app. Furthermore, we structure the rewards such that a referrer gets increased incremental rewards as their referral engages more with the app. This entices valuable users to stay on our app, which allows us to generate valuable traffic for our partners.
IA: Educating users is a big part of the evolution of iGaming, as there are new users coming to sports books, who may not fully understand all the aspects and lingo. How do you look to educate users with your app?
KJ: Education is key to our ability to deliver valuable users to our partners. We aim to educate users in an intuitive way by showing them the rewards they can win and letting them figure out how to obtain those rewards. We skip the boring reading and lecture-style educational pieces, and instead let users go through a trial-by-fire by picking directly on live upcoming sports games, similar to how they would if they were betting. The catch is that they don't have to stake any money, eliminating the downside. This allows our users to dip their toes into making their first pick and bridges the gap that real money gaming (RMG) sometimes has trouble doing. At any point in the app, if a user needs a term explained, there are helpful info icons that can educate them through definitions.
The evolution for responsible gaming within HotTakes is already being developed. We are actively working on gamifying responsible gaming further through rewarding users for taking quizzes related to the topic, and building bucketing systems to allow us to identify highest-risk players on our app and engage them with our educational offerings before sending RMG content their way.
To learn more and get in touch with the HotTakes team, reach out today.
Thanks to Kevin for sitting down with us to chat. Be sure to get in touch with their team to discuss any partnerships!
