These will cover everything from team news & customer insights to opinion pieces from the team, like this insight into how the Cuckoo brand was built.

Expert advice on topics like privacy, security, networking, connectivity and technology. We'll be inviting industry experts and household names to share their knowledge on a variety of topics.

We welcome you to contribute, please get in touch if you’ve got an idea.

(Community member @ChrisR5 has already written our first guide, and we have one from @PhantomR1982 in the pipeline.)

Updates straight from the Cuckoo's nest! All the latest news from the growth, UX & Design, Technology, service and leadership teams. And you can even go back and read all the old Cuckoo monthly customer newsletters. Fancy that. 

If you have any feedback (good or bad) on the Content Hub then pop your thoughts on the community. If you would like to contribute an article or a guide then please message our Head of Brand & Experience Tommy. 

Introducing the Cuckoo Content Hub

Today marks the launch of the all-new Cuckoo Content Hub: a home to our blogs, guides & news updates.

The navigation on our site has had a visual refresh and been optimised for speed.

The sign up button that appears on mobile now responds to the speed the user scrolls at, to make interaction more intuitive.

Customers will now receive an invoice for their setup charge which can be dowloaded from My Account.

The tech team spent 2 weeks focussing on improving performance of the site, and they delivered! The user experience is a lot faster now.

If you’re trying to move home with us you can no longer select your current address to “move to”. (yes some people tried this 👀)

We’ve removed date of birth entry from the sign-up flow. By signing up to Cuckoo you now agree that you are 18 years old or over.

For further tech updates keep an eye on the Cuckoo content hub, where each month we’ll be showing what we’ve been up to behind the scenes.

Welcome to the inaugural tech update for Cuckoo. These updates will cover all things product development for you to marvel over, or in some cases think “I’m so glad they solved that”.

Tech Update - March 2021

We’re Cuckoo. We’re on a mission to make the internet frictionless. We’re one of the top-rated broadband companies on Trustpilot in the UK. And we’ve got a really awesome team.

We raised capital this year to help fulfil our mission. And while the best capital to raise is from happy customers, the next best is from investors. As a first-time founder/CEO, the process of getting investors to back us was new to me.

So here’s the guide I wish I’d had when I started. So if you’ve got a business plan, a bunch of people doing work, or even some paying customers, but you need more funds to help make it sing, then hopefully this guide will help you. Feedback appreciated!

Mindset 🧠 : Why an ambush is a great analogy

Targeting 🏹 : Finding the right people

Reaching 🚪: Establishing the first contact

Results 📊 : What was the end result?

The first step is to get into the right mindset. You know the market, the problem and the solution. And fundraising is a process of finding and converting people to your world view, fast.

Just as not every customer first looking at your product will buy it straight away, the same is true for investors. It’s a sales funnel! So try to take concepts you understand from sales and apply them to fundraising to develop your personal mindset.

I found that an ambush is a great analogy to think of for fundraising. You need to spend a lot of time preparing (recon), select the right moment (kill zone) and set metrics that trigger the raise (security team).

Why did it help me thinking of fundraising like an ambush? It got me in the right mindset. I’m choosing the location and timing of the operation and nudging the scales of chance in my favour!

You’ll need to have a think about who the best investors might be for your business. Not everyone will care about your market, or even see the opportunity that you see. You need to build up a sixth sense of what can pull someone in. Is it your team's background? Their own previous investing experience? Or even their own experience of the problem you’re trying to solve? Thankfully for us, most people have had an issue with their broadband provider…

Current investors: Clear and consistent communication with current investors enabled them to feel comfortable with the trajectory of the business, encouraging them to follow on.

Approach angel/seed investors in similar consumer-focused businesses: We tried to find similar businesses (like Bulb or Monzo) and go after their early investors. If they’ve invested once, they might be interested in doing it again.

Bankers/professionals with experience in TMT (technology, media and telecoms): This can be a challenge since industry professionals have often ‘seen it all before’ so may be less open to a new perspective.

Exited starting team/senior teams of established startups in their later stage: While these people likely won’t have domain expertise, they do have very useful skill sets and/or access to funds.

How you make the first contact is important, but not THAT important in my view. Just treat people like normal human beings and then move on! There’s a lot of debate about cold vs warm intros. If you make enough cold intros by yourself, then eventually the warm intros will follow.

Cold emails: This is a very powerful tool and is under-appreciated. Quality over quantity was important here for us.

LinkedIn messages: A bit like emails, but you first want to ask to connect, and then when they accept you can follow up with a SIP message (acronym explanation in the next section).

Twitter messages: An approach we’ve found to work well is initially tweeting at people for their general advice. You can then continue the conversation via DMs.

Promoters (typically charge 5% of what they raise): A bit like mini-investment bankers who take a hefty fee when bigger companies IPO, promoters help source capital. They range from single one-woman bands to big networks.

Companies House confirmation statements: This is my favourite tactic. If you look at public Companies House filings, you can get the forename and surname of the starting investors of any company. A really useful way to find individuals. See Results 📊 to see how much we raised via this route.

Network, network, network: Often investors you pitch to will intro you to their friends. This second and third-order network effect is very powerful (and time-consuming…).

This is where you’ll spend most of your time and there are 5 rough stages.

1) The tease: An intro message that doesn’t overwhelm but teases a bigger thread of information. People are naturally interested. Play on that. Cold approaches should be:

Short — Keep it simple. Keep it short.

Informal — You should make it seem like you’ve typed the message there and then and is not just copy and pasted.

Personal — You should reference something personal about the target’s CV or experience. The more investigation it takes to find this information — or the more unique it is — the more likely they are to be impressed that you found it, and then hopefully respond.

2) The deck: Everyone needs this so you kinda need to provide it, often with a five bullets summary to set some context. Try using DocSend so you can track engagement. There’s nothing stopping you from iterating on the deck as the fundraising progresses.

3) The first meeting: This is where you want to wow investors with your story, how you first sought out this market, unit economics and future plans. Most investors ask the same questions, so again try and iterate on the answers.

4) The information dump: You usually then send prospective investors a whole host of information.

Investor deck —slides should tell a story

Unit economics explanation — how the maths add up for each customer

Financial model — how the maths add up over time for many customers

Valuation rationale — why our shares are worth a certain value

Cap table — what shareholders own, including options

Blogs — show what we believe and our world view

5) Follow-ups: This stage is dependent on each investor but can involve 2–3 more calls, references from current investors or even switching to the product! And remember to set up the deal, e.g. via Seedlegals.

We used the above approach, converting about 8% of those people who viewed our investor deck. That’s double the average global website conversion rate, so we must be doing something right.

Just as broadband companies inject fear of losing out on cheap deals by putting time limits on broadband contract price deals, it works the same for investors! When you’re first raising funds this is really hard to do, since you can’t really inject urgency when there’s nothing changing in the business. It becomes much easier once you’re established, but in the meantime try to use external events (e.g. regulatory changes) to peg timings to.

Picked a close at 1minute past midnight on a specific day and stuck to it

Picked a total funding amount that was achievable, then aimed to overfund (selecting the right number is more an art than a science)

Marked each investor lead in a CRM and classified them as High, Medium or Low interest, as well as the last time contacted

Kept last contact to a minimum 2–3 days with the aim of getting a decision as efficiently as possible so we could move on (i.e. pushing people up the interest chain until they either fall off or convert)

Just as you ask for feedback from customers, doing so after a fundraise is very useful. We sent a Typeform out to all those who viewed our investor deck (another reason why DocSend is useful).

Here’s a summary of what investors thought (both who invested and didn’t):

“Super strong branding/messaging. Clearly a super determined founder/great hussle. At this early stage, founder determination is critical. You strike me as somebody who will run through walls and won’t stop. Great regular updates. Very good ‘signal’. Willingness to take feedback. Even this feedback request is a great signal. Deck was very good. Very clear and well designed.” 🤩

“Very strong vision, well-drilled narrative and story presentation, humble accepting of advice” 🙂

“Perhaps I wish you were tackling something more interesting” 🙃

“I felt I had to dig around to get to key financials” 😬

“No startup experience vs lots of agency experience” 😔

“IMO you will always be valued off of EBITDA multiple not revenue which makes it hard to build a really big business” 😢

Well, a whole bunch of places. So the learning from this seems to be that you need to knock on a lot of people’s doors. Good luck! 🙏

You’re selling shares. It’s simply that. Don’t overthink it.

Fundraising 101: How to secure £500k for your startup

But you’ve run into a problem! Your router doesn’t have a modem connection to plug straight into the wall. Not to worry, your Cuckoo router can come to the rescue!

Plug the Cuckoo router into the wall as you normally would, use the ADSL/VDSL filter provided and plug from the filter into the grey port.

Either connect to your Cuckoo router’s wireless network or plug in an ethernet cable into one of the yellow ports to connect to it. On your device, open a web browser and go to: 192.168.1.1

It should look something like the picture above. Click Sign in at the top of the page and then log in with your “Access Key” which can be found on the back of the cuckoo router or use your own password if you have changed it.

Once logged in, click on the “i” symbol on the “Gateway” tab and scroll down to the bottom and click on “Setup your Gateway”

Click on the dropdown for “Routed Type” and click “Bridge”. Make sure that the MTU is “1500”, VLAN Enabled is on and the VLAN ID is “101”. Click close. You’re nearly there!

To check that you are in “bridged” mode, the “Internet access” tab should say “Gateway in Bridge Mode”. If it says this, you’ve completed the hard part!

On the back of the cuckoo router, make sure to plug an ethernet cable into the yellow LAN ports 1-3. This is important asLAN port 4is used for maintenance, should something happen with your internet connection/Cuckoo router. See below for the port guide:

Then plug the other end of the ethernet cable into the “WAN” port on your own router. This will more than likely be separate to the other LAN ports.

You’ll need to go into the admin panel of your own router (it’ll more than likely be on 192.168.1.1 . If not, check the back of your own router for details).

Once in the admin panel, look for WAN or Internet settings. Set the “WAN connection type” to “PPPoE”. A couple of boxes for username/password should appear.

At Cuckoo, PPPOE login details are generic. The username is pppoe@cuckoo.co and the password is 123456789.

Once done, you should have an internet connection!

Please Note: Step 4 may be slightly different for everyone as many different routers (especially mesh network boxes!) have different layouts. As long as you look for something similar to what is noted, you should be OK. Mesh network boxes usually have an app instead of web interface, so follow step 4 the same way, but use the app instead of going to the web interface.

Hopefully this has been helpful and will allow you to use your own hardware on the cuckoo network! We’re sad to see that you don’t want to use the provided router (it’s good!), but everyone has different needs.

This guide was built on the top of Tommy's foundation instructions for mesh networks.

Any problems, please post in the help section on the forum and we’ll do our best to help!

So, picture this, you’ve just joined the flock and you’ve bought/got your own router to squeeze every single megabit of bandwidth out of your line for intense gaming sessions, or maybe just to get the Wifi signal to stretch just that little bit further to the bottom of the garden…

Introducing the Cuckoo Content Hub

Blogs

Guides

News Updates

More from Cuckoo

Tech Update - March 2021

Fundraising 101: How to secure £500k for your startup

How to use your own router/hardware with Cuckoo

How fast can you go?