We’re here today with Mark Evans Managing Director of Dreamscapes Networks. Mark thanks for your time. Are you able to share some of the background to Dreamscapes?
Audio Transcription
Mark Evans: [00:00:17] Yeah absolutely. So it’s one of those great tech stories that started in a spare bedroom in Perth. I was living with the founder at the time and this is back in 2000. We used to go to work during the day, come home at night and we’d be in this small tiny little office tapping away on our laptops and he said I’m starting a domain name company. And I said what’s that? And as they say the rest is history. So that’s really where it started in 2000 it was really a sideline hobby business for the first few years. And in 2007 it got serious when we did something crazy and launched Crazy Domains. And that was a cut price domain provider to take on the larger competitors namely MelbourneIT and Net Registry. So from there on 2009 the founder and I were on holiday in Thailand where we were were talking about who could be the face of Crazy Domains, who could be the ambassador for Crazy Domains. We wanted to play on the word crazy. We were throwing some crazy names around like Mike Tyson, Ozzie Osborne, Pamela Anderson. We went with Pamela Anderson. So the campaign went live late 2009. We hit headline news in the UK, US and Australia. We got banned from TV. We had a million hits in a week which is the equivalent to 10 million hits these days. And business had exponential growth at around 89 percent in the next 12 months so things really started to take off but we started to see some cracks from rapid expansion and growth and we were a cut price provider so we weren’t focussed on customer service but we knew that that needed to change and that’s what we did. So 2013 we opened a world class technical support centre in the Philippines. And we’ve grown that up to 400 staff right now and performing very, very well and you know great customer satisfaction results are above 90 percent for the past 16 months consecutively. So doing really, really well. And then in 2015 we repositioned the brand away from being that cut price to main provider to being a trusted and affordable online solutions provider with premium service. And we’ve done that very successfully. In 2016, December, we listed on the ASX as a public company and so less than a year old up to today. So we’re still very young and learning but 2017 for us has been a busy year as a public company. We’ve done three acquisitions to date. One actually being today which was good. So but the most prominent one was Vodien Group Singapore’s number one hosting provider and also number three for .sg domains. So we’ve seen rapid growth in the business. You know we’ve moved from around 40 staff to 555 staff and really a global presence through the business but still a majority of our business coming from Australia and New Zealand.
David Tasker: [00:03:09] Are you able to share the three key pillars of the business?
Mark Evans: [00:03:13] Absolutely. We have three pillars of the business. Number one being domains. That’s where you get your web address your .com.au or your .com or whatever it may be that is your key on ramp to getting online or your first step to your digital identity. And it’s also the introduction of additional online services. Natural progression from those into the hosting pillar that’s your data, Data Centre as such where you keep your website and your e-mail and that is a higher margin business. And we’ve spent the past few years improving infrastructure with data centres in Singapore, UK and also Australia. Natural progression from the hosting pillars into the third pillar which is solutions which is our product suite. Easy to use solutions designed to help our customers establish, build, maintain and grow their online presence. And we have a number of products in the solutions pillar and I’ll give you a couple of examples. DIY Web site builder, a do it yourself Web site builder like a WIX. Business directories, automated online listing tool and simple SEO search engine optimisation made really easy. So they’re three pillars of our business. But the key take out is that we are a subscription business and we have subscriptions anywhere from 1 to 10 years averaging two years but paid upfront paid in full which makes us really strong as far as cash flow from operations and gives us great visibility into the revenue and bookings for the years ahead.
David Tasker: [00:04:37] And what should investors look for from the business over the coming months?
Mark Evans: [00:04:42] For us it’s all about now top line growth. We’ve basically spent the past five years really building getting the foundations, the infrastructure everything in place and scalable for growth. We are now in that position where we are scalable for growth and we will be focused on that top top line growth. We were really looking internally and really fixing the customer care side of things. Making sure the lifetime and retention of a customer improved, the lifetime value of a customer improved and we’ve done that very, very well. But now it’s about top line and about rapid growth and moving into South East Asia which is really our focus moving forward. We’re focussed on five English speaking Asian countries. Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines and that’s where we see a lot of growth. These are truly emerging markets. Three point eight million people coming online each and every month in Southeast Asia which is absolutely phenomenal. There’s 390 million population across those five countries, 63 percent Internet usage and growing year on year. And it really is a an emerging market and peak periods now really happening around 25 percent growth in the domains space. So these kind of peak periods of what we saw in Australia at peak times back in 2011. So you know they are slower to adopt but they are early adopters coming online and we definitely want to be focussed and be in Southeast Asia and that’s what we’ve done with our acquisition of the Vodien Group. We’ve provided that perfect beachhead or platform into the rest of the Southeast Asian countries which is our focus moving forward.
David Tasker: [00:06:21] Mark busy history. Busy times ahead. Thanks for your time.
Mark Evans: [00:06:24] Thank you very much.
