Cat Goetze may be a tech founder, but she’s on a years’ long journey to reduce her reliance on devices.
Two years ago Goetze, who goes by CatGPT on social media, wanted to swap her smartphone for something more low-tech.
“I was kind of just sitting around [thinking] it’d be so cute if we still had landline phones and you could twirl the cord and talk with your friends,” she tells CNBC Make It. “That just felt nostalgic and chic to me.”
Looking into it, she didn’t realize getting a landline for her apartment would require getting a new number and paying for a phone line. So, the 20-something zillennial built her own version from a phone she thrifted: “I literally just hijacked a landline phone and made it Bluetooth compatible.”
The pink clamshell handset quickly became the most talked-about feature in her apartment. Whenever someone buzzed into her building’s security system, Goetze would let them in from her landline. She could also place outgoing calls from the set.
After two years with it, Goetze unveiled the phone to her online audience in July 2025 to see if anyone else thought it was a good idea.
Within hours, hundreds of people commented on the video within hours saying they needed the device. She set up an online shop to collect pre-orders thinking 15 to 20 people would place actual orders and she could make the devices by herself in her apartment.
Goetze’s project, Physical Phones, passed $120,000 in sales in its first three days, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The business has sold over 3,000 units and made $280,000 in sales by the end of October.
“It literally felt like we had captured lightning in a bottle,” Goetze says.
Users are tapping into nostalgia to combat excessive screen time
Physical Phones currently has five styles of phones that range from $90 to $110. Goetze partnered with an electronics manufacturer to produce the phones, and the first batches are set to ship to customers starting in December.
Physical Phones connect to both iPhone and Android devices via Bluetooth and will ring when the smartphone receives a phone call, or an audio or video call from platforms like WhatsApp, FaceTime, Instagram and Snapchat; the audio of the call then routes to the Physical Phone.
Users can place outbound calls by dialing a phone number or pressing the star sign (*) to activate their smartphone’s voice assistant and instructing it to call a contact’s name.
Physical Phones are landline-style phones that connect to smartphones via Bluetooth.
Julia Harris
Goetze says the success of her business aligns with a growing movement of people trying to reduce their screen times and reliance on smartphones.
She points to the Covid-19 pandemic as having a major impact on how people use their phones today. People were stuck at home and away from people, so they turned to apps like TikTok to fill the time and feel connected.
Now, as some consumers grow skeptical about tech companies’ hold on their attentions, and are getting tired of navigating AI and AI-generated content online, people are trying to course-correct, Goetze says.
“Our attention spans are shorter. We feel more anxious. We’re less present and unable to enjoy our lives. We’re going through a total loneliness epidemic,” she says. People are now “starting to put their foot down and realize, ‘You know what, I actually don’t want this, and I’m going to go ahead and choose a different future.”
Goetze stops short of “demonizing” technology, however, explaining that it’s “what brings us sustainable forms of energy and vaccines and a bunch of really good things for for the world, but it’s like, OK, how do we live in harmony with it?”
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