GRUELLING IPO PAYS OFF FOR DREAMSCAPE, COO REVEALS

IT'S been a gruelling 12 months for online solutions provider Dreamscape (ASX: DN8) which just released its maiden full year result.

Thankfullly the company, which owns Australia's Crazy Domains and Singapore's Vodien Internet Solutions, posted a record year across all key metrics.

During FY17, managing director and CEO Mark Evans, along with Crazy Comains COO Gavin Gibson, transformed Dreamscape from a domain name registration provider to a complete online solutions business.

Credit to its transformation, Dreamscape achieved a soliid revenue of $46.4 million and NPAT of $2.1 million in its first year of listed trade.

Key highlights included the acquisitions of Net Logistics (an Australian hosting provider) and Vodien Group. This was the first-time Dreamscape had been able to make large scale acquisitions of this kind and the company expects to see these investments pay off in FY18.

Business News Australia spoke to Gavin Gibson about Dreamscape's first full year as a listed company, what the acquisitions mean for the group moving forward, and what's in the pipeline.

What was the key to success for your first full year as listed company?

Really for us it was about sticking to what we know and what we do best.

The IPO process was pretty gruelling from every angle, no matter how much we tried it really did take us away from focussing on the business.

We successfully launched our Crazy Domains brand into Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the Philippines, we completed the two acquisitions of Net Logistics and Vodien, we launched several very successful products which have been in the works for probably 12-18 months prior to listing.

Our sales team are kicking some major goals and we generally saw continued improvements in our targeted marketing and customer support.

Overall it was really a collective effort from the whole team to just keep that relentless focus on executing our strategies and goals that we had in place prior to the IPO.

What do the acquisition of both Vodien and Net Logistics mean for the company going forward?

Well acquisitions are an interesting space. We've not previously been in a position to obtain acquisitions so it was pretty exciting for us to envelop that as a key component as the listing and our strategies.

Both Vodien and Net Logistics give us a variety of operational and market benefits in addition to the obvious fiscal returns.

Our brands really complement each other in that we're covering different market segments, particularly with Crazy Domains it's quite a focus in SMB area where Vodien and Net Logistics more stray into that medium to enterprise business focus.

We'll be taking some products from Vodien and Net Logistics and enveloping them into our brand.

What's in the pipeline for FY18? How are you transitioning from a domain name provider to a more general online services provider?

That's a transition that we've actually been working on for probably two-three years now in terms of the ground work.

We did a lot of market research in advance of our marketing campaign and really that led us to a full realisation of our customer base and really what they wanted.

Overall, we've seen that our typical customer being an SMB they don't want to engage several providers to manage their online presence and to grow their online presence.

At large they're time poor as it is so we've really been working over the last few years to improve every single aspect of our business from products to customer support to really cater for this need.

There's a bunch of domain providers and hosting providers, there's not really any solutions providers doing it well from our perspective helping an SMB getting online and growing a business online with ease.

That's really what we build our brand and our products around is that capability to achieve all those things both efficiently from a time perspective but also from a cost perspective.

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Business News Australia