Cat Goetze made her first Physical Phones prototype in her apartment—a landline shell rigged with Bluetooth so she could take calls without touching her smartphone. She posted a TikTok video. Nothing happened. Two years later, having built a platform with several hundred thousand followers on her CatGPT account, she posted the same product to a completely different outcome: $100,000 in preorders in three days, no supply chain in sight. Six months and a full manufacturing sprint later, Physical Phones had crossed $800,000 in revenue. Here, Cat breaks down how she went from a weekend prototype to shipping 1,000 phones in just a few months—and what she learned about content, customers, and knowing when to hand someone else the keys.
On the prototype that sat in her apartment for two years:
I was on this five-year journey to spend less time on my phone—going to the gym without it, driving to the grocery store without it. And at some point I thought, I’m just going to get a landline. So I Googled how to get one and immediately realized I’d need a whole separate phone number, I’d have to pay more money to AT&T, and most apartments aren’t even wired for it anymore. I was like, This is so ridiculous.
My background is in tech, so I’m thinking, this is not that hard. If you took the shell of a landline phone and put Bluetooth in it, you’d have a Bluetooth landline. That was the idea. I bought a landline, figured out a way to hijack it to be Bluetooth compatible, and that became the first prototype. I lived with it in my apartment for almost two years before I ever brought it to social media.
The first time I tried, I had a regular day job. I thought it was a fun weekend project: I’ll make a video, post it on TikTok, and if nothing happens, no big deal. Sure enough, nothing happened. I had no reach, no idea how to use social media. I’d made a Shopify store, it flopped, and I was like, OK, whatever.
On the difference between launching with zero followers and hundreds of thousands:
Cut to two years later. I’d established this platform, several hundred thousand followers, enough to really get my voice out there. When I posted that first video of the original prototype to the CatGPT audience, it was a completely different experience. We did over $100,000 in sales in the first three days.
I went into it with genuinely no expectations. That’s why in so many of my videos I say I started a phone company by accident. I’m constantly launching random projects and ideas and they almost never go anywhere—that’s kind of my thing on my platform. The previous summer I was like, I need a website called Popfolio, it’s kind of like LinkedIn but for entrepreneurs and freelancers. We got like 7,000 sign-ups. Most of them were bots. And I was like, OK, that didn’t really work.
I think creators and business owners need to take more risks with their content because you never know what’s going to pay off. And the reality is, if it flops, no one’s going to even see it, let alone remember it. The algorithm does the heavy lifting for you. If you make something halfway decent, it will find the people who want to watch. And if it doesn’t work out, no one will see it.
On offering value before asking for anything:
Instead of saying, Here’s why you should buy my Physical Phone and all the things it can do—which, we do have content like that—it all started from this place of, Here’s why you actually scroll on your phone way longer than you need to. Let’s talk about doomscrolling. Let’s talk about the forces at play in your brain chemistry. I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m actually trying to help you.
When you come into social media trying to offer something to people in active service, you’re much more likely to aggregate the community you’re looking to build. And then at a later date, you can share with them, Oh, and by the way, I made this thing that I think you’ll really enjoy.
The other cheat code is that when you’re building a personal brand, it’s in the name—the brand is personal. So if I like the Physical Phone, and people are already following me for my taste and the kinds of products I talk about, it’s very likely that something else I like will resonate with them too. Passion is contagious and people can feel it when it’s real.
On waking up $100K richer with no supply chain:
Sheer terror. I’m like, I just conned $120,000 from these people. You feel like such a fraud. I was like, If I don’t get 1,000 Bluetooth landline phones—which, does anybody even make these? I couldn’t find one on Amazon. So, I guess I’ve got to find a manufacturer and ask someone to build this—question mark.
The first thing I did was call my brother, because he’d done dropshipping-type stuff with overseas manufacturers. He was like, You are hilarious. I can’t believe you’ve stumbled into this problem. Let’s figure it out together. So we identified a few different phone manufacturers who had experience making actual landline telephones and also had Bluetooth capability in-house. We asked them to send samples, airfreighted them over from Asia, tested them, and picked the best one.
The samples were hideous, no offense to them, but we were just testing functionality. Drop tests. Is it stable? Are they easy to work with? Are they communicative? And then there’s the stuff you never think about. I can tell you the exact number of millimeters of the button casing on each model. Should the charging cord be one-and-a-half meters or two meters? I’ve never thought about these things in my life.
On treating preorder customers like co-builders:
The most important thing was that our communication with these customers had to be top tier, 10 out of 10, every single time. We did weekly email updates letting people know exactly what was happening with their preorder. I had a series called Catcalls where I went live every week, put my phone number out there, and took calls on a Physical Phone. People could call in and ask about the status of their order, how production was going, or just random questions.
I knew these 1,000 people weren’t just any customers. They were the first to put their money down when there was no real supply chain set up. The amount of trust they’d put in me was paramount, and I wasn’t going to do anything to risk that.
We wanted our preorder customers to feel like they were building this with us. All the videos were behind the scenes: in the warehouse, showing what testing products actually looked like, what it means to get a sample from overseas, how we think about giving feedback to the factory.
I think this old way of thinking—we need to come across as very professional and always have everything together—the game has changed. The more you bring people into the fold, the more they feel like they’re part of the story, and the more brand loyalty they actually have with you.
That included communicating delays. We thought our ship date was going to be November. It turned out to be December. And people were totally fine, because we’d been honest the whole way through. We’d always give refunds, no questions asked. But most people just wanted clarity. The worst-case scenario is sweeping it under the rug.
On the Bluetooth bug the manufacturer said was unfixable:
The number one piece of feedback from our first round of phones was this bug where—imagine you’re paired to the Physical Phone and it’s across the room. You’re sitting on the couch, you open Instagram, click on a Reel, and the audio starts coming out of the Physical Phone. Because it’s basically a Bluetooth speaker. Annoying.
Josh Silverman, who was heading product at the time, went back to the factory and said, “We’ve got to fix this.” The factory said, “That’s just how Bluetooth works. We don’t really know what to tell you.” So Josh, not taking no for an answer, took the whole problem to ChatGPT, explained the situation in detail, and ChatGPT recommended this technical protocol. He lifted it, brought it to the team, and they were like, “OK, we can try it.” Sure enough, it fixed the problem. Now on all subsequent Physical Phones, audio from Spotify, Instagram, TikTok—none of it comes out the phone. It just takes calls.
That’s what I call collapsing expertise gaps. None of us are electrical engineers. But AI lets a non-engineer solve an engineering problem by giving us the language and the specifics to bring back to the factory.
On using AI for the hard questions, not the easy ones:
There are three main ways we use AI to grow the business. The first is collapsing expertise gaps—exactly what Josh did with the Bluetooth fix. The second is structuring human thinking. My assistant, Maggie, was heading up all of our customer service during the initial launch, which was a bear. No standard operating procedures (SOPs) in place, no external team—just Maggie cranking through it. When we were finally able to outsource, she had to write an ungodly number of SOPs and macros for the new team. She used ChatGPT and Claude to translate everything she’d done over two or three months into clean, clear documentation. Basically taking messy human knowledge and structuring it so another human could understand it.
The third way is strategic thinking, and this is the one I think people underutilize most. At the end of last year, I gave Claude a download of all my business information—expenses and revenue line items from the previous year—and asked, How much money can I afford to spend on personnel in 2026? I could have asked anything. But the combination of real-world data plus big, meaty questions given to a thinking model is a totally underutilized resource. People think of AI as just a chatbot. Give it the harder problems.
On choosing not to be CEO of her own company:
Josh was an early member of the founding team. He helped with product development and operations from the beginning, so when I offered him the position to run the day-to-day business, the company was in great hands. But the real reason was self-awareness. I’ve taken a few different turns in my career where I’ve gone into the product or tech direction, and I always feel most at home when I’m making videos and content. I felt it would be a disservice to the brand to try to serve a lane I wasn’t best suited for.
I think I’ve always been entrepreneurial at my core, but I’m only now learning how to leverage that as a strength instead of feeling like it’s a weakness. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the mentality there is very specific: You’re going to be a VC-backed SaaS founder, you’re going to do that company for the next five to 10 years, otherwise you’re not an investable founder. That was the only way I’d ever seen people do it. Now what I’m learning is that the thing with longevity isn’t any single product. It’s the community. It’s the platform. The ideas themselves can exist as experiments, and that might actually be a strength.
I know I’m an entrepreneur at heart. “Founder” still feels like a loaded label from Silicon Valley—like someone who raises $5 million in seed capital from a VC. That’s not me. But being scrappy? I’m just constantly ripping experiments. And when this one worked, I was more excited than anything else.
Be sure to catch Cat’s full conversation on Shopify Masters. You’ll hear more about why she thinks Gen Z is drawn to a phone they didn’t grow up using and the full-circle case for why offline is the new luxury.
