How this 29-year-old made landline phones cool again—and brought in $789K last year selling them

People are nostalgic for a simpler time without smartphones, social media and AI. Cat Goetze is dialed in.

The 29-year-old in Los Angeles is the founder of Physical Phones, a Bluetooth-enabled landline phone business that’s taken off in recent months.

In 2025, her business brought in over $789,000 in sales, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

But like all “overnight” success stories, Goetze has been working at it for a while now.

Call waiting

Goetze says she first had the idea for a landline-style phone product in 2023 after spending the better part of the pandemic trying to reduce her screentime. She daydreamed about her childhood sharing a landline with her family.

Cat Goetze is the founder of Physical Phones, a Bluetooth-enabled landline style phone.

Tristan Pelletier | CNBC Make It

“When I grew up, there was this booklet that the school sent out to all of the families in the school district that literally had all of the students’ names and their home phone numbers,” Goetze says. “I distinctly remember prank calling some of the other people in the school using that phone book.”

But when she looked into what it would take to actually install a landline in her home, including getting a new phone number and paying the $80 monthly service she was quoted, she set out to find a different way.

As a creator, your job is really to kind of hold an antenna out into the zeitgeist and pick up on what people want creatively, spiritually, emotionally.

Cat Goetze

founder of Physical Phones

“With my technical background, I thought to myself, itprobablywouldn’tbe that difficult to just hook up a landline phone to my smartphone,” says Goetze, who pursued an interdisciplinary major in science, technology and society at Stanford. “Then I started tinkering around and prototyping and figuring out a way to build that.”

In 2023, Goetze built a prototype of her first phone, a pink handset, and posted it to TikTok. At the time, she didn’t have much of a social media audience, and the post got no traction or sales.

“I was like, OK , whatever, that’s fine. This was like a fun project,” she says. “I wasn’t really trying to make money off of it anyways.”

Two years later, in 2025, she’d gained a following for her online brand, CatGPT, where she discusses AI and digital wellness.

She was also noticing more people talking about wanting to reduce their smartphone dependence. It reminded her of her landline phone prototype, so she posted about it again.

That video from July 2025 went viral, getting over 8 million views across Instagram and TikTok. The product, officially branded Physical Phones, passed $120,000 in sales in its first three days.

“As a creator, your job is really to kind of hold an antenna out into the zeitgeist and pick up on what people want creatively, spiritually, emotionally,” she says. When she revisited the idea at just the right moment, “it took off.”

Christina Locopo | CNBC Make It

Dialing up the business

Physical Phones are battery-powered and connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth.

Once connected, the landline acts just like your cellphone. If your phone rings, the landline will too, and you can carry out your call from the handset. To make an outbound call, you can use the landline set to directly dial the number.

For most of us who no longer memorize phone numbers, you can also pick up the handset and dial star (*) to activate the voice assistant on your phone, like Siri, where you can direct it to dial a certain contact.

The Physical Phone also works with audio calls from FaceTime and Whatsapp.

Pre-orders for Physical Phones opened in July 2025 and fully funded the first round of production, covering things like warehousing, shipping, printing, hiring and “everything else that we needed to actually get the business off the ground,” Goetze says.

Physical Phones currently sells three styles of phones — a handset, a wall mount and a rotary version — that range in price from $90 to $110.

Tristan Pelletier | CNBC Make It

The business sources phones from a manufacturer in Asia, meaning it also lost a “whopping portion” of profits due to tariffs under the Trump administration’s new policy, Goetze says.

Goetze says working with a manufacturer was the hardest part of the process of launching Physical Phones because she’d never done it before and, as she learned, it can be time-intensive.

“It’spretty draining, honestly, because what I underestimated before building Physical Phones was just how every single detail gets pored over for a hardware product,” she says. It took two to three months to finalize the first Physical Phone, she adds.

Goetze says her goal with the first round of orders was to deliver them to customers by December 2025 in time for Christmas.

Shipping everything by cargo boat would have taken too long, Goetze says. The only way for them to meet their goal was to fly all the phones from the manufacturer in Asia to their warehouse in California by cargo plane.

The endeavor cost the company nearly $74,000, which covered the international freight charge; customs entry fee; and delivery, service and administrative expenses.

“Itwas a huge hit to our profit margin,” Goetze says. “But I also think thatit’sthose kinds of decisions where you really stand up for your customer and you show them how much you care.”

Cat Goetze posted a call for pre-orders of Physical Phones in July 2025. The business passed $120,000 in sales within three days.

Tristan Pelletier | CNBC Make It

Once they got all the phones to their warehouse, Goetze says she and her team “called in every single friend, family member, colleague, neighbor that I knew andbasically askedanybody with a pair of hands to come to the warehouse and help us break down and shipall ofthese phones within 24 hours.”

Goetze says she and herteamprepared4,000 ordersfor deliveryacross the U.S.in December 2025.

Ringing off the hook

Physical Phones currently sells three styles of phones, including a handset, wall mount and rotary phone, which range in price from $90 to $110. To date, Goetze says the business has sold over 7,500 devices.

Physical Phones made about $439,000 in profit in 2025, which Goetze says she reinvests back into the business for research and development for new models, and to hire for her small team of four.

Christina Locopo | CNBC Make It

Goetze doesn’t take a salary from Physical Phones and supports herself with earnings from her CatGPT media business, which includes branded content and content partnerships.

She recently hired a CEO, Josh Silverman, who was brought on during the first round of production and now runs the business day-to-day.

Looking ahead, 2026 is all about growing Physical Phones through potentially selling to retail, Goetze says.

Cat Goetze is soon launching Cat Labs, a creator-first product studio where she plans to build new products, apps, websites and services.

Tristan Pelletier | CNBC Make It

“One of the main questions that we’re toying with right now is: Do we want to continue to have this sort of drop model where we ship out large quantities of inventory at a time, or do we want to have more of a traditional e-commerce or evergreen model where we have stock consistently?” she says. “There’s pros and cons to each.”

Goetze is soon launching Cat Labs, a creator-first product studio where she plans to build new products, apps, websites and services.

“As a creator-founder,” Goetze says, “my zone of genius, if you will, comes from my ability to stick that cultural antenna up into the air and understand what my audience wants, and being able to predict and build what they want next.”