Catherine ‘Cat’ Goetze – better known online as CatGPT – has become an unlikely hardware founder by resurrecting a piece of 20th-century tech: the landline.
Her start-up, Physical Phones, sells Bluetooth-enabled retro handsets that look like classic desk or wall phones but connect to a smartphone, letting you talk without staring at a glowing slab.
It is a small, nostalgic hack aimed at cutting screen time – and it has suddenly turned into a serious business.
Goetze, a Stanford graduate and technology educator, first built an audience by demystifying AI through her CatGPT brand on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, where she explains generative AI and digital attention in a deliberately non-technical, non-patronising style.
By early 2025 she had hundreds of thousands of followers and tens of millions of views across platforms. The same concern with how technology shapes focus and wellbeing now sits behind Physical Phones.
The origin story is disarmingly simple. A couple of years ago Goetze realised she was ‘tired of being glued’ to her smartphone and wanted something more low-tech – the feeling of sitting with a corded handset, twirling the wire and just talking.
When she discovered that installing a real landline meant new numbers and monthly fees, she did the tinkerer’s thing instead: she ‘hijacked’ a thrift-store landline, gutting and rebuilding it so it worked as a Bluetooth handset for her mobile.
The result – a pink clamshell-style phone that could answer buzzer calls, handle outgoing calls and sit like a sculpture on her side table – became a conversation piece whenever anyone visited.
For almost two years it stayed a personal experiment. Then, in July 2025, she posted a short video of the set-up for her followers, expecting a few dozen curious comments.
Instead, the reaction was immediate and intense. Hundreds of people asked where they could buy one. Goetze hastily spun up a tiny online shop, imagining 15–20 pre-orders she could assemble herself.
Within three days, orders had crossed $120,000 (around ₹1 crore), according to figures later cited by CNBC Make It and other outlets.
By the end of October 2025, Physical Phones had sold more than 3,000 units and generated about $280,000 (roughly ₹2.5 crore) in revenue, forcing Goetze to partner with a manufacturer and move from DIY project to actual hardware company.
The devices themselves are deliberately simple. Physical Phones currently offers several styles – rotary-inspired desk phones and slim wall-mounted handsets in colours such as bubble-gum pink, snow-white and fire-engine red – priced at roughly $90–$110 or ₹8,000–₹9,800, depending on the model.
They pair with Android and iOS phones via Bluetooth: when someone calls your mobile number, or rings you on WhatsApp, FaceTime, Instagram or Snapchat, the retro handset rings instead, and the audio routes through the landline-style phone.
Pressing the star (*) key can trigger your voice assistant, and some models can be used either on a table-top or wall-mounted, with a rechargeable battery and support for pairing with multiple phones.
In interviews, Goetze is clear that she is not anti-tech. Her framing is about ‘living in harmony with technology’: keeping the good parts – connectivity, safety, work – while creating physical boundaries against endless scrolling.
The landline-style phone is a kind of behavioural nudge: your smartphone can sit charging in another room, notifications out of sight, while you still take calls, gossip with friends or join a meeting from the couch.
The timing helps explain the product’s traction. Post-pandemic, there is growing anxiety about smartphone addiction, short attention spans and the sense of a ‘loneliness epidemic’ fuelled by hyper-digital lives.
Goetze’s pitch fits neatly into a broader ‘analogue renaissance’ – the revival of vinyl records, paper planners and dumbphones – but with a twist: Physical Phones are not anti-internet artefacts; they are minimalist interfaces to the digital world.
Media coverage has leaned into that cultural angle. Business and tech outlets from Livemint and The Economic Times to Hindustan Times, News18 and Moneycontrol have framed her as a ‘zillennial’ founder channelling nostalgia into a ‘viral’ solution for screen-fatigued Gen Z and millennials.
A Hindi tech site described the phones as a way for users ‘trying to escape smartphone addiction’ to reclaim some peace while still answering calls on WhatsApp and beyond.
At the same time, Goetze’s background as CatGPT gives her distinctive positioning. She is not just selling retro gadgets; she is part of a cohort of creators talking about how AI and attention economies reshape our brains, study habits and relationships – and then offering concrete tools to push back.
Her earlier work in AI education, recognised by awards and a fast-growing following, feeds directly into the narrative that Physical Phones is as much about digital wellbeing as it is about aesthetics.
As of late 2025, Physical Phones remains a young venture: first batches are only just shipping, pre-orders are still being fulfilled and questions about long-term demand, competition and supply-chain execution remain open.
Even so, Cat Goetze has already done something unusual in today’s software-obsessed tech scene: she has turned a tiny, tangible tweak to how we use our phones into a profitable micro-business and a talking point in the wider debate about how much time we really want to spend staring at screens.
