How this 29-year-old made $789,000 in 2025 by selling landline phones

People are nostalgic for a simpler time before smartphones, social media, and AI. Cat Goetze dialed in.

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

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

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

Götze said he first came up with the idea for a landline phone product in 2023 after spending much of the pandemic cutting back on screen time. She fantasized about her childhood, when she shared a landline with her family.

“When I was growing up, the booklet that the school distributed to every family in the district literally had every student’s name and home phone number on it,” Goetze said. “I distinctly remember using that phone book to make prank calls to other people at school.”

But when she looked into what it would actually take to install a landline phone in her home, including getting a new phone number and paying for the quoted $80 a month for service, she decided to find another way.

“Having a technical background, I thought it wouldn’t be that difficult to just connect a landline to a smartphone,” said Goetze, who majored in interdisciplinary science, technology, and society at Stanford University. “Then I started tinkering around and making prototypes and figuring out how to build it.”

In 2023, Götze created her first mobile phone prototype, a pink handset, and posted it on TikTok. At the time, she didn’t have much of a social media audience, so the post didn’t get any attention and didn’t generate any sales.

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

Two years later, in 2025, she had built a following with CatGPT, an online brand that talks about AI and digital wellness.

She also noticed that more people were talking about wanting to reduce their dependence on smartphones. It reminded her of the landline phone prototype, so she posted about it again.

That video from July 2025 went viral, garnering more than 8 million views on Instagram and TikTok. Officially branded “Physical Phones,” the product generated $120,000 in sales in its first three days.

“As a creator, your real job is to tune into the zeitgeist and capture what people want creatively, mentally and emotionally,” she says. I revisited the idea at just the right time, and “it happened.”

The physical phone runs on battery power and connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth.

Once connected, a landline phone functions just like a mobile phone. When the phone rings, the landline also rings, so you can talk from the receiver. To make an outbound call, you can dial the number directly using your landline phone set.

Most of us who no longer remember phone numbers can also pick up the handset and dial star.

You can launch your phone’s voice assistant, such as Siri, and ask it to dial a specific contact.

The physical phone also supports voice calls from FaceTime and Whatsapp.

Tristan Pelletier | CNBC Make It

Goetze said the company, which sources its phones from Asian manufacturers, has lost a “huge chunk” of its profits due to the Trump administration’s new tariffs.

Goetze says working with manufacturers was the most difficult part of the process of launching a physical phone. Because I’ve never done anything like that before and I’ve learned that it takes time.

“Honestly, it’s quite a pain, because what I underestimated before developing the physical phone was how meticulously every detail of a hardware product is thought through,” she says. It took two to three months to complete the first physical phone, she added.

Götze says the goal for the first order was to get it to customers by December 2025, in time for Christmas.

Transporting everything by cargo ship would take too long, Goetze said. The only way they could achieve their goal was to transport all the cell phones from manufacturers in Asia by cargo plane to their warehouse in California.

The effort cost nearly $74,000, which covers international freight. Customs fees. Shipping, Service and Administrative Fees.

Tristan Pelletier | CNBC Make It

Goetze said that once all the phones arrived at the warehouse, she and her team “called up all my friends, family, co-workers, neighbors that I know and basically asked anyone with two hands to come to the warehouse and help us disassemble all these phones and ship them out within 24 hours.”

off-hook ringer

Physical Phones currently sells three styles of phones: handsets, wall phones, and rotary phones, with prices ranging from $90 to $110. Goetze said the company has sold more than 7,500 devices to date.

Christina Locopo | CNBC Make It

Mr. Goetze does not receive a salary from Physical Phones and makes his living from revenue from the CatGPT media business, which includes branded content and content partnerships.

She recently hired CEO Josh Silverman. He was hired during the initial production phase and now runs the day-to-day business.

Tristan Pelletier | CNBC Make It

“One of the main questions we’re wrestling with right now is do we want to continue with this kind of drop model where we ship large amounts of inventory at once, or do we want to embrace more of a traditional e-commerce or evergreen model where we always have inventory,” she says. “Each has its advantages and disadvantages.”

Götze will soon launch Cat Labs, a creator-first product studio where he will build new products, apps, websites, and services.

“As a creator and founder, my area of ​​genius comes from my ability to stick my cultural antennae in the air, understand what my audience wants, and then be able to anticipate and build what they want next,” says Goetze.