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How an AI Expert Built the Most Analog Product of 2026
00:50:15
Before the screen-time backlash hit the mainstream, Cat Goetze was already building an analog antidote. Her brand Physical Phones—Bluetooth landlines designed to replace smartphone habits—generated $800K in its first year and turned a personal frustration into a full-blown cultural movement.
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- [00:00]
Kat
It feels like such a hack to be an entrepreneur alive and existing at the same time as social media. And the price is a little bit of cringe.
- [00:14]
Serena Smith
What happens when an AI expert decides it's time to unplug? Catgetzy combined cutting edge tech with old school nostalgia to launch physical phones, the retro inspired hardware brand that helps people reclaim their time from screens.
- [00:26]
Kat
What a blessing it is to put the world down for a moment and just, like, breathe and be present. That's really what we're selling.
- [00:32]
Serena Smith
But Kat didn't just build hardware. She built community by sharing her journey as a content creator. She generated viral organic interest, sold out on pre orders, and made nearly $800,000 in sales in just six months, bootstrapping it all from scratch. Kat's here to unpack how she hacked the system, why the next big tech revolution might just be about stepping away from the screen and how AI can actually help you build your dream life.
- [00:54]
Kat
If I'm going to be the best version of myself, how do I use technology and not let technology use me?
- [01:00]
Serena Smith
I'm Serena Smith and this is Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and scaling a business. Kat, so stoked to talk to you today.
- [01:08]
Kat
Thanks for having me.
- [01:09]
Serena Smith
Thanks for being here. Analog is back, baby. As it seems.
- [01:14]
Kat
So it seems.
- [01:15]
Serena Smith
What kind of personal or cultural desires were you feeling into that sparked the genesis of physical phones?
- [01:22]
Kat
Yeah, well, I think we've all been experiencing this, like, pendulum swing back into this analog renaissance ever since AI really crossed a threshold, where all of a sudden now it feels like you cannot trust that anything you see online is even real. I think just culturally, we all were kind of at that same moment feeling this desire to touch grass and reconnect with humans and people in our communities again. So honestly, that was initially the kind of cultural underbelly on which, like, physical phones was born.
- [01:54]
Serena Smith
Yeah, I was reading this thing recently about how there was a period of time where wealthier people were getting screens and technology into the hands of their kids. And then tech became cheap and ubiquitous. And now you see more screens and tech in the hands of more underprivileged kids. And the sign of wealth is not having that is having your kids off of screens. I think that's like such an interesting transition that we seem to be undergoing as a society.
- [02:24]
Kat
I completely agree. I think you could argue this is the first time in history where you've seen the sort of upper class, if you will, restrict their children's access to social media, digital tools, or at least pushing a certain level of media literacy so that they have the skills that they need to basically navigate the future appropriately. It's a wild time we're living through.
- [02:45]
Serena Smith
It's a really wild time. And it's like there is such a particularly interesting tension in you because you, you were functioning as a content creator in many ways. You were leading this largely digital existence and your profile is CAT GPT. You were teaching people about AI, and yet you also had this desire to take yourself away from it to some degree.
- [03:13]
Kat
Yeah, yeah, I know it seems a little oxymoronic, like, how is that possible? But to me it makes perfect sense, right? These are two sides of the exact same coin, which is, I like to think about it as like, if I'm going to be the best version of myself and I'm going to build my dream life, how do I use technology and not let technology use me? And so technology is a part of that story, both in good ways and in bad ways if I let it. And so to me, it's less about, okay, it's all or nothing. You're either all in on technology, we're using it all the time. You're addicted to social media. You're cranking on every AI tool out there and you're using it in any use case or, or you're on the other side of the spectrum, which is like you throw your phone into the ocean, you become a complete Luddite. And I don't think either of those are a realistic path to a highly fulfilling, successful life, which is what I want. It's about, okay, how do I use the technology to build businesses and, you know, create my dream life, but also not get so locked into a digital wormhole that now all of a sudden I'm spending eight hours a day on, on social media.
- [04:13]
Serena Smith
I think it's going to be all of our life's work figuring this out, right?
- [04:18]
Kat
It is.
- [04:19]
Serena Smith
How then did the actual idea for physical phones come to be?
- [04:22]
Kat
I was on this like 5 year long journey to try to spend less time on my phone. This started for me around Covid. So I was kind of, I guess like a little bit earlier than I would say when the conversation really started online. And because I was already on this path of like trying to just reduce the amount of time I had my phone on me. I was going to the gym without my phone. I was driving places, going to the grocery store. If I know the route, why do I actually need my phone? Oh, wait, I don't. Let me just see if I can make it to the grocery Store and back without it. Small things like that.
- [04:50]
Serena Smith
Did it feel initially like you were, like, leaving a limb behind naked?
- [04:54]
Kat
Yeah, like something. And then, of course, you do it. Like, nowadays, what I'll try to do is I try to drive with my phone in the trunk. If I know where I'm going, I know how to get, you know, to the grocery store, to the gym from my place. Let me just leave my phone in my trunk. And every time it's like this tension, I'm like, but what if? And then you realize that. That what if is like, what? So you can check for notifications at a red light. Totally. You don't need to do that.
- [05:19]
Serena Smith
You don't need to do that. What if you actually just looked at the trees outside?
- [05:23]
Kat
And what happens is when you actually slow that down, that becomes the time that ideas pop into your head. You need to be bored. You need to have enough time to not be having ideas put into your brain that you can actually just sit there in silence. And, like, you'd be amazed. You'd be amazed what your brain can come up with.
- [05:41]
Serena Smith
It's such an incredibly important piece of advice for any human being. But also, like, as founders, too. Right. Like, you're wearing so many hats. There's such an endless to do list. Right. And we live in this culture of, like, endless optimization.
- [05:57]
Kat
Yes.
- [05:58]
Serena Smith
Fill every possible moment, Always be doing something, always be optimizing. And it's like, actually, one of the ways that you can optimize is just like, give yourself some blank space, you know? But it's terrifying to people.
- [06:09]
Kat
It is, it is. It's like, oh, God, I don't want to hear my own thoughts. That sounds terrifying.
- [06:13]
Serena Smith
Now I got to do the internal work. Right?
- [06:15]
Kat
Exactly. Oh, heavy. Don't want to do that.
- [06:18]
Serena Smith
Okay, so you're. You're leaving your phone at home.
- [06:21]
Kat
I'm spending less time on my phone. I'm learning how to reduce my dependency on it. And I think just sort of naturally. Yeah. It made me hearken back to a time I grew up with a landline and thought of, like, I remember what it was like when we didn't even have smartphones. This wasn't even a question of, like, do I bring my phone with me? I can't. And so because I was already kind of in this mode, I was like, I'm going to get a landline. Like, I'm just going to do it. And I went through the process of being like, okay, cool, Googled how to get a landline, Realized I need to get an Entirely different phone number right away. That's not going to happen. What am I going to tell people? Hey, I got two phone numbers now. Never going to work. Second of all, you have to, like, pay money, more money to AT&T every month. And lots of homes and apartments aren't even outfitted for landlines anymore. So I was like, this is so ridiculous. And my background was in technology, so I'm like, this is not that hard. Like, if you literally. And this is where the idea came from. I was like, if you literally took the shell of a landline phone but put a Bluetooth antenna in it, you could just turn it into a Bluetooth landline. And that was the idea for the physical phone.
- [07:19]
Serena Smith
And is that essentially how physical phones function?
- [07:21]
Kat
That is exactly how physical phones functions, yes.
- [07:23]
Serena Smith
So somebody calls you on your smartphone and it will ring.
- [07:28]
Kat
Yeah, exactly.
- [07:29]
Serena Smith
On the physical phone.
- [07:30]
Kat
Got one right behind me here. Yep. So they come in a few different designs, but they all function exactly the same. You turn it on, you take your smartphone, iPhone, Android, whatever it is, you scroll to your Bluetooth menu the same way you would Bluetooth pair to your car or Bluetooth speaker. You just see physical phones, it pairs. Once it's connected, it's connected forever. It'll remember it. And then from that point forward, you can put your phone in a drawer, you can put it in the other room. And if somebody calls your smartphone, the physical phone will ring, and it has this, like, really old retro kind of bell sound. And just like with a landline, you don't know who's calling, so you have to pick it up and you have to say, hello, who's this?
- [08:05]
Serena Smith
Oh, my God.
- [08:06]
Kat
And you have to kind of have that interaction, and you can put it down and it hangs up the call. It literally functions exactly like a landline. You can make outbound calls on it. The one thing I will say that is different is because nowadays we don't memorize people's phone numbers, we had to come up with a way to make it so that you could conveniently call someone without having to memorize everyone's number. So we actually integrated a function where it can use Siri if you're using an iPhone or your voice assistant, where if you press Star, you can say, you know, call mom. And then it'll place an outbound call to the contact in your phone named Mom. So you can still do outbound calls without memorizing people's numbers.
- [08:42]
Serena Smith
Amazing. Mom, who knows a lot about landlines.
- [08:45]
Kat
Yes. And it's probably the one number you actually do know, which is funny. But like anybody else you can call,
- [08:50]
Serena Smith
I'm like, laughing at myself because it's like I. It's like kind of giving me goosebumps. Like, what is the physical satisfaction of holding the phone?
- [08:58]
Kat
It's incredibly satisfying. It's this weird feeling. The first time you have a phone call on the physical phone and not on your smartphone, I think the first thing you'll notice is like, you can't pull it away and start scrolling. Like, you cannot get distracted. You are so locked into this phone call with this one person, you're so present. And that's what we learned is what people really wanted when they originally reached out and got their phones, was they wanted to have more present, deeper connections with the people in their life.
- [09:23]
Serena Smith
You were a content creator at the time and still are, and you had some background in tech as well. What did it require to get the first prototype of a physical phone into your hands?
- [09:37]
Kat
Yeah, so the first prototype I just made myself in my apartment. I basically bought a landline phone and then figured out a way to hijack it, basically to be Bluetooth compatible. And that was the very first prototype that I actually lived with in my apartment. I actually had the first prototype of the physical phone for almost two years before I ever brought it to social media and started talking about it online as a content creator.
- [10:02]
Serena Smith
Why wait two years?
- [10:03]
Kat
So I tried. So what had happened in the beginning was I was not a content creator. I had a regular day job working nine to five, what have you. And I thought, this is like a fun weekend project. I'll make a video, I'll. I'll post it on TikTok, not expecting anything to happen. And if nothing happens, it's not a big deal. I've invested literally one weekend into this. And so that's exactly what I did. And sure enough, nothing happened. I had no reach. I had no idea how to use social media or do reels or TikTok or anything like that. So, you know, I had made a Shopify store, but it kind of flopped. And I was like, okay, whatever, that's fine. Cut to two years later. I had established this platform. I was on, you know, catchy bt, and I don't remember exactly how many followers I had at that time, but, you know, several hundred thousand. Enough of a platform to really be able to get my, my voice out there. And when I posted that first video of that original prototype with the CAT GPT audience, it was a completely different experience. We did over a hundred thousand dollars in sales in the first three days. To answer your question of like, how do you make the prototype realize like, oh, I can't just make these in my apartment for these pre orders now, like I have to actually find someone who can manufacture these at scale.
- [11:08]
Serena Smith
You have this following but you're also like, your profile is cat GPT. You're mostly educating people on tech and AI. And then you post this video of like, here's this like nostalgia nostalgic old school phone that I made. Is anybody interested? Like how did you think people would respond at the time?
- [11:26]
Kat
Honestly, I think for me it was so like I have nothing to lose. I think this is cool, so why not? I didn't even really go into, into the experiment if we're going to call it that as like I hope people like this or I wonder what they'll say. It's like the reality is in the kind of like opt out short form media content world that we live in today, we are constantly getting bombarded with so much content creators need to take. And business owners, I think 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.
- [12:00]
Serena Smith
Right?
- [12:00]
Kat
So you might as well just try.
- [12:02]
Serena Smith
That's like the definition of a flop. It's like, oh, five people saw it, who cares?
- [12:06]
Kat
Exactly. The algorithm does the heavy lifting for you. If you make something halfway decent, it will find the people out there who want to watch. And if it doesn't work out, then that's fine. No one will see your video. No one will see your suck ish video.
- [12:18]
Serena Smith
So did you have any sense at all of expectation?
- [12:23]
Kat
Honestly, no. I have to say that's why in so many of my videos I say, like, I started a phone company by accident.
- [12:28]
Serena Smith
Yeah.
- [12:29]
Kat
Because I'm, I'm constantly launching like random projects and ideas and they almost never go anywhere. Like that's kind of my thing on my platform is I'm just like putting out like I don't know. The previous summer I was like, I made a website called PopFolio and it's kind of like LinkedIn but for entrepreneurs and freelancers. I think we got like 7,000 signups. Most of them were bots. And then I was like, okay, that didn't really work.
- [12:49]
Serena Smith
Even though that does seem like a
- [12:51]
Kat
great idea and I might pick it up later on and maybe it'll work better the next time, you know what I mean? But I think both my strength and My weakness as a founder and as an entrepreneur is that I love like trying new things and picking things up constantly. So it means that I don't get married to certain ideas very much. But it also means that sometimes it's hard for me to like stay committed to an idea for a long period of time. So it's a double edged sword.
- [13:09]
Serena Smith
You can read a little bit of fickleness, right? Yeah, that's such a particular thing. To be able to not hold something too tightly and to not be too precious about things. Were you always that way or did you have to learn it over time?
- [13:21]
Kat
Oh, that's a great question. I think I've always been that way at my core, but I'm only now learning how to leverage it as a strength as opposed to feeling like it's a weakness. So for example, like I lived in the Bay Area for a while and there the mentality is very much like if you're going to be a founder, you are going to be a VC backed B2B SaaS founder. It follows like a very specific profile of person.
- [13:44]
Serena Smith
There's one right way to do it,
- [13:46]
Kat
there's one right way to start a company and if you're not doing. And honestly it's like I had no, to be like completely frank, graduating college, I had zero conception of any other way to start a business. I just like did not think there was. You obviously have to start a tech company and you're going to do that company for the next five to 10 years of your life. Otherwise, like you're not an investable founder. No one will ever want to give you money.
- [14:05]
Serena Smith
Right.
- [14:06]
Kat
And this is all pre.
- [14:07]
Serena Smith
And now you're going to exit. Right?
- [14:08]
Kat
Exactly. And go live on your boat or whatever. And it's like this was the only way that I had seen, seen other people do it or that was being talked about around me. So yeah, I think I've, I've always kind of internalized this idea that it's like, well, if it's, if I'm being a good founder, it means I'm having one idea that I'm so crazy passionate about that I couldn't possibly put it down in shorter than five years. And I think now what I'm learning is like, actually I think like having this audience and having this distribution as a content creator means the thing that I have that has longevity is the community and is the platform to constantly be able to keep iterating and trying new things and bringing new experiments to the audience and bringing them into that story that's the thing that has longevity, but the ideas themselves can exist as experiments and that actually might be a strength.
- [14:57]
Serena Smith
That's the through line. That's the constant piece.
- [15:00]
Kat
Yes.
- [15:01]
Serena Smith
The community.
- [15:01]
Kat
The community and I would say the media component, the platform isn't going anywhere. It's not like tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and be bored with Cat GPT. Like Cat GPT is the thing that I will never be bored of. Not to say that I'm bored with physical phones or, you know, getting bored of other ideas, but point being, there's the through line of like, what are we creating next? And what's like this engine for new
- [15:21]
Serena Smith
ideas and like what a powerful engine it is that we have at our fingertips to be able to get this immediate real time response and feedback and validation or lack thereof.
- [15:37]
Kat
Yeah.
- [15:37]
Serena Smith
And it's free.
- [15:38]
Kat
It free. Feels like such a hack.
- [15:41]
Serena Smith
Yeah.
- [15:41]
Kat
To be an entrepreneur alive and existing at the same time as social media. Like truly, especially this particular moment in time because TikTok is no longer just like the funny dance app and Instagram has honestly, I think kind of taken that short form vertical video optin style feed and really like made it fantastic. And so we have these places now where you can just like blaze out so many different types of content and just see what sticks and see what works. And again, it's like it's a hack if you can find your own voice on these platforms because then you just have access to the whole world instantly. And the price is a little bit of cringe. Like you have to be willing to climb Cringe Mountain, but if you're willing to go on that expedition, like the view is not too bad once you get up to. You don't have to get all the way to the peak, but even a few steps up is pretty great.
- [16:36]
Serena Smith
I've heard you say this, that you're very comfortable climbing cringe Mountain. And I think it's also something that can spark like a fair amount of terror in people.
- [16:46]
Kat
Yeah.
- [16:46]
Serena Smith
You've been making content since you were 13 years old. So do you think that that's at least in part just a product of like getting your reps up in your 10,000 hours?
- [16:57]
Kat
100%? I think one of my most unfair advantages is that. Yeah, exactly. I've been making videos and talking into a camera. So for basically as long as I can remember, I started when I was 13. Obviously I didn't know that that wasn't planned. It's not like I knew that was going to be some sort of strategic advantage in the long run. But yeah, I mean, I do reap the benefits of it every day. I remember the first couple of times seeing myself on camera and being like that. There's no way I look like that or sound like that. And now it's like I watch my own stuff and I'm like, initial shock. Yeah.
- [17:28]
Serena Smith
Yeah, it's rough. Why do you think that's the thing that you have stayed committed to all this time? And there was a period of time where you stopped making content and then found that you were compelled to come back to it. What is it that is feeding you?
- [17:47]
Kat
Oh my God, that's such a good question. I feel like that question could make me emotional if I think about it for too long.
- [17:51]
Serena Smith
Okay, think about it for too long.
- [17:54]
Kat
Tears. I think that for me it really does come to this place of like. Like everyone will have their own opinion or what they think about, like the meaning of life and all these things. But I feel like I know, like my purpose is here and it's just to like tell stories and make things. And I know that sounds so broad and generic, but from a very young age I do remember making videos and feeling like something just clicked and I would just lose hours in like imovie, you know what I mean? Like filming on tape on my parents Sony camcorder and just like making these little home movies of me and my siblings. And that's just always been my total flow state. And so the five year gap that you're referencing, when I did not pick up a video camera for five years, those were the five years after I graduated from college and I basically went into the corporate world. I was, you know, holding down. That's when I was working in technology and it was kind of like a coming home. I needed to like hit bottom a little bit in certain ways to be like, oh, I. I'm an artist and I like miss making art. And it's really sad that I haven't given myself the permission or the leeway to feel that out and like play with that in five years. That's like really sad. And I'm glad I figured it out in five years and not 50. But at the same time it took some reps to get back on again. Like, I remember the first couple of videos I was filming and I actually have it still. Maybe I'll bring it out one day. But it's like me filming myself in the car and I'm just like awkwardly staring at the camera for like 30 seconds before I even say anything. So I'm just Like, this is so uncomfortable. I need to, like. It's like riding a bike again. You got to get used to it.
- [19:34]
Serena Smith
Yeah. It's like riding a bike in that it will come back to you, but it's also like riding a bike which, like, if you have actually ever taken a long break from riding a bike, like, you're wobbly when you get back on.
- [19:44]
Kat
Yeah. Total. Or you're scared.
- [19:46]
Serena Smith
Yeah.
- [19:46]
Kat
You know what I mean? And you have to, like, trust that your instincts will take over. But. But, I mean, I do always say if you are making content, you are making art. And I know that might be, you know, contested by certain people in the artistic community, but I think anytime you're making something from nothing and you're using the right side of your brain, maybe that's called making art. Creators exist in sort of this weird spectrum between pure artist and pure salesperson, because you do have to ultimately understand what your audience wants if you want to grow. Some people don't care about growing, and that's fine.
- [20:15]
Serena Smith
Right.
- [20:16]
Kat
But if that's an important goal for you, then you have to be able to both, you know, understand what the audience wants, but also. Also tap into your own creative source, if you will, and use that to drive. Okay, what am I going to make next? Even if it doesn't make sense to my audience today, kind of like when I launch physical phones to my audience of, you know, AI enthusiasts, do you
- [20:36]
Serena Smith
think you have a good sense before you put an idea out into the universe of what your audience wants and needs?
- [20:45]
Kat
Yes, I think so. I think so. I mean, my audience will still surprise me sometimes.
- [20:50]
Serena Smith
I mean, they surprised you with physical phone.
- [20:52]
Kat
Yeah. Yeah. But what I will say is I really like the physical phone, and I think that's the other kind of like, cheat code in all of this, is when you're building a personal brand, it's in the name, Right. The brand is personal. It's about the person. So in many ways, it's sort of like, well, if I like it and the brand is about me and what I like, and people are already following me for my take or my taste or, you know, the kinds of products that I'm bringing out into the world and the things that I talk about, it's very likely that if I talk about something else that I like, that will resonate with them as well.
- [21:24]
Serena Smith
Passion is contagious.
- [21:25]
Kat
Yeah.
- [21:26]
Serena Smith
And we can feel it when it's real. Yeah. This is such a meaty topic, I think, for so many early stage founders or aspiring founders, they're not necessarily coming into this with the privilege of having built an audience already. Do you have any advice for when people are trying to do it alongside or just sort of immediately preceding a product launch so that it doesn't feel like it's landing too far on the sales end of the spectrum?
- [21:53]
Kat
I think that the founder story is extremely compelling. Like we love watching videos of people going for it in life. Whether it's what the show is. Yeah, exactly. You know, and whether it's about starting a business or an athlete's story, we love a story like that. So I would say lean into that advantage. You can tell your story and that's very authentic because I'm, you know, people will want to know, like, how did you come up with this idea? Like, how did you decide to go all in? Where did this idea come from? Like, why now? You know, what makes you so confident? All the kinds of things that we're curious to hear from other founders and entrepreneurs and people who are going through the same thing as us. That is extremely compelling. That would be my one piece of advice. And then the other piece I would say is to try to find ways to offer things to your community where you are not asking for anything in return. So instead of me saying here's why I think you should buy my physical phone and all the things that it can do, which we do have content like that, but it all started from this place of like, here's why you actually scroll on your phone for way longer than you mean to. Let's talk about doom scrolling. Let's talk about the forces at play here in your neurochemistry. Like I'm not asking for you to do anything in that I'm actually trying to help you. And I think when you come into the world of social media and this like interest based media that we're seeing in an active service and trying to offer something to people, you're much more likely to actually aggregate the community of people that you're looking to build and then at a later date you can share with them. Oh, and by the way, I like made this thing that I think you'll really enjoy.
- [23:21]
Serena Smith
You are offering something of value without the expectation of anything in return. And just like in irl, human relationships, that's going to curry goodwill and trust. Right, right. Okay, so to get back to your founder story, you put this video online, you get $120,000 pre sales in three days. I'm like trying to put myself in your shoes. Like you wake up, you're $120,000. But like, you don't have $120,000 worth of phones.
- [23:55]
Kat
No, ma'. Am.
- [23:56]
Serena Smith
So, like, what are you feeling in that moment?
- [24:00]
Kat
Terror.
- [24:01]
Serena Smith
Terror.
- [24:01]
Kat
Sheer terror. I'm like, I just conned $120,000 out of these people. Yeah, they don't know. You know what I mean? You feel like such a fraud. Oh, my God. It was, it was terrifying. I was like, if I don't get 1000 Bluetooth landline phones, which I. I don't know how who does anybody make these? I'm like, I gotta find these.
- [24:23]
Serena Smith
And you're like, I just MacGyvered one in my house.
- [24:25]
Kat
Exactly. Because I couldn't find one on Amazon myself. So I'm like, okay, well, no one's selling these on Amazon. I can't find them on any, like, other websites online. So then I'm like, I guess I gotta find a manufacturer and ask someone to build this question mark, question mark. Because I'm like, I've never done this before. Like, this is such a black box for me. And I'm doing it like, you know, now I look back and I'm like, wow. We had the luxury of having all this pre order revenue so we could fund the first round of production. But at the time, it felt like I had this whole burning in my wallet of like people kind of tapping their foot and being like, where's my phone? Yeah.
- [25:01]
Serena Smith
What did you communicate with the people who had pre bought the phones at the time to give them a sense of like, hey, this isn't gonna happen overnight.
- [25:10]
Kat
Totally. So what I told myself and very soon after the team that I hired when this happened was, look, we need to get the product right, we need to get all of this right. But the most important thing is that our communication with these customers has to be like, top tier, 10 out of 10 every single time. We need to be doing weekly email updates of letting people know exactly what is happening with their pre order. And I actually had a series called Cat Calls where I was going live every single week and putting my phone number out there and taking calls on a physical phone where people could call in and be like, what's the status of my order? You know, how is production going? Or they would just ask other random questions. But I knew that these 1,000 people weren't just any 1,000 customers. They were the first 1,000 to put their money down when there was no real, like, supply chain set up yet. So the amount of trust that these particular 1,000 people had put in me as a founder was like, Paramount. And I wasn't going to do anything to risk that. So we communicated through, through all channels, pretty much constantly throughout the first round of production.
- [26:20]
Serena Smith
Okay, so what did you do? You're staring at this money, you're feeling the terror, you're like, I don't know anything about physical manufacturing.
- [26:30]
Kat
None.
- [26:30]
Serena Smith
Yeah, I mean, that sounds like an incredibly steep learning curve.
- [26:33]
Kat
Yes.
- [26:34]
Serena Smith
What, what did it take to get that initial run produced?
- [26:37]
Kat
Yeah, so the first thing I did was I called my brother because my brother has done like drop shipping type stuff with manufacturers before. So he's never like built a, you know, a large shopify business necessarily into like the millions, but he knew his way around, like how to get stuff made basically in bulk overseas.
- [26:58]
Serena Smith
Good guy to know.
- [26:59]
Kat
Yeah, I was like, I gotta call a guy. I was like, I need someone. And he was like, you are hilarious. I can't believe you've stumbled into this problem. Like, let's figure it out together. And so he helped me in the very beginning just like figure out how to do sourcing essentially. And you know, at that point we're like, should we work with a sourcing agent? Should we just like hit up Alibaba? Should we just message a bunch of people? You kind of try everything and then figure out what works. So what we did was we identified a few different manufacturers who both had experience making actual landline telephones, but who also had Bluetooth capability in house. And then we asked them to send us samples. We evaluated the samples. You know, they basically air freight them, ship them over from Asia, and then we test them and pick the best one. And then, you know, the samples that we got were, no offense to them, but they were hideous. Like, we couldn't use the actual. But we were just testing functionality, doing drop tests. Is it secure, is it stable? Are they easy to work with, Are they communicative? All those kinds of things.
- [27:59]
Serena Smith
This feels like one of those things that like starts out in a place of like, there's not that many components to consider to pull this off. Like, it's a phone, right? And then you get into it and you're like, oh, no, they're. Oh, wow. There's like a thousand things that I, that I didn't consider. Like what elements of being deep in the details really surprised you, dude?
- [28:17]
Kat
Button casing. I'm like, I can tell you the exact number of millimeters of the casing around each of the buttons on the certain models that we have. It's like, it's so specific. It's like, you know, things you never think about, oh, the charging cord for the phone. All of the physical phones can be plugged in all the time or they're battery powered. You can take them on the go, recharge them like an iPhone. Should the cord be one and a half meters or two meters long? I've never thought about these things before, but, I mean, we get so down into the details of these things. And I think that's the other area where AI actually has a really interesting mix into the work that we're doing. Even though it's analog and the tech feels very analog, we're actually using AI constantly to build this business because we're navigating such unclear territories.
- [29:04]
Serena Smith
I mean, I would hope you are done before.
- [29:06]
Kat
Yeah, 100%. So, like, like, we've given actual, like, very technical electrical engineering feedback to the factory that was recommended to us by, you know, the different AI models that we're using to fix issues that we've run into.
- [29:20]
Serena Smith
Can you give me an example?
- [29:21]
Kat
100%. So when we sent out our first round of phones, when we met our Christmas delivery, the number one most common piece of feedback that we heard from customers was this bug where basically, imagine you're sitting at home, you're paired to the physical phone. The physical phone is in the kitchen, or it's across the room, and you're not taking a call right now, but you open up your phone, you're sitting on the couch, and you start scrolling Instagram, and you click on a reel, and the audio from that reel starts coming out of the physical phone. Oh, right. Because it's kind of like a Bluetooth speaker, right? Super annoying, very weird. You're like, oh, disconnect Bluetooth, change the speaker, whatever. There's, like, some workarounds, but mostly it's just annoying. That was the number one piece of feedback that we got. And Josh, who is heading up product at the time, has since been promoted to the CEO. He went back to the factory and said, look, we gotta fix this. And the factory at that point was like, that's just how Bluetooth works. Like, we don't really know what to tell you. And he, not taking no for an answer, basically took that to ChatGPT, explained the situation in detail, and ChatGPT recommended this technical workaround. I think it's called HFP or something like that. And he just sort of lifted and shifted and brought it to the team, and they were like, okay, we can try it. And sure enough, it fixed the problem.
- [30:26]
Serena Smith
Wow.
- [30:26]
Kat
So now on all future physical phones, audio from Spotify Instagram, TikTok. They don't come out of the phone, they just will take calls, essentially.
- [30:35]
Serena Smith
Are there other ways that you're incorporating AI as ChatGPT that you can share with us that might be of utility to our founder audience?
- [30:43]
Kat
Oh, my gosh. I'm constantly documenting and trying to categorize all the different ways that we're using AI as a business. I actually just published in my newsletter a piece about the kind of three main ways that we're using AI to grow the business. So the three are collapsing expertise gaps, which is exactly what I just talked about. Structuring human thinking and then doing strategic work. So structuring human thinking is where you go to the AI and just word vomit a complex problem that you're approaching or something that you are trying to get through, and then you actually leverage the organizational skills of the AI to structure your input and then leverage that for another task. So an example of this would be Maggie was heading up all of our customer service for the duration of the initial launch, which was a bear. Like, we had no SOPs in place. We had no external customer service team. Like, it was just Maggie cranking on Gorgeous, basically burning the phones. Burning phones, yeah, exactly. But when, you know, things finally calmed down and we were able to outsource that, she had to write an ungodly number of SOPs and macros for the new team to take over. And she was basically an expert in using ChatGPT and Claude to translate everything that she had just done over the past two, three months into very clean, clear, easy to understand SOPs and structuring. Again, that kind of like messy human thinking into something very concrete so that it can be passed off and understood by another human being.
- [32:06]
Serena Smith
SOPs, meaning standard operating procedures, essentially, like codifying the things that she knows in her head into documentation so that it can be passed along.
- [32:14]
Kat
Exactly.
- [32:15]
Serena Smith
Okay.
- [32:16]
Kat
Yeah. And then the last way is strategic thinking. So I try to always encourage people not to just use AI for the easy stuff, like make this email sound better, but really give it the harder meteor problems. So a perfect example of this that I did at the end of last year was I gave Claude a download of all of my business information, specifically expenses and revenue line items from the last year. And I said, here's what 2025 looked like. How much money can I afford to spend on personnel in 2026? That was kind of the main question that I was wrestling with at the time. I could have asked anything. I could have said, you know, what are some unique creative Ways that I could try to make money, new business venture that I could go into in 2026 or anything like that. But I think the combination of using existing real world data plus like big heady, meaty questions and giving it to a thinking model is a totally underutilized resource. When people think of AI as like
- [33:09]
Serena Smith
just a chatbot, the ways that it can just like absolutely supercharge your thinking and also the time spent. Sometimes it's like stuff that you could do on your own, but it's of kind like SOPs it's going to take hours and hours and hours and hours.
- [33:22]
Kat
Exactly.
- [33:23]
Serena Smith
Now it's happening in a matter of moments.
- [33:25]
Kat
Yeah.
- [33:26]
Serena Smith
And it sort of harkens back to what you were saying earlier, which is like utilizing it to actually get you off of your screen. Right. You're creating space in your life to go spend an hour making the meal or be outside and touch grass, right?
- [33:41]
Kat
Yeah, exactly.
- [33:42]
Serena Smith
That's the way to leverage it.
- [33:43]
Kat
It's like creating that blank space we were talking about of like, well, you'll actually come up with better ideas if you're not constantly context switching between tasks. And instead you're actually able to like drive in silence for, you know, half an hour and just like get to point B without feeling like you need to be banging calls and like hopping on one thing to another all the time.
- [34:03]
Serena Smith
AI can't teach us how to have comfort with stillness. That's like, that's its own thing. But it's definitely for another conversation. Though you didn't really go into it with this in mind. I think there's also something so fascinating about the pre sale model that you utilized in terms of validating product market fit. Because it's like not only were these people saying we want this phone, but they were also saying we want this so badly we're willing to wait for it. Which like is kind of a crazy notion in this day and age. Who wants to wait for anything these
- [34:37]
Kat
days in a world where we're used to getting anything from like toilet paper to, you know, dinner in two hours or less? Like it's crazy. It's yet another reason why I was like, we need to be so on our game, communicating with these customers and letting them know exactly what's happening with their phones. And by the way, that also included like communicating delays. Like, we thought it was going to be November, it's actually going to be December.
- [35:00]
Serena Smith
And how did people respond?
- [35:02]
Kat
Totally fine, honestly. We listen. We had some contingent of people who would come back and say, I'm not waiting that long. I'd like my money back. And we gave refunds in like 24 hours flat. No more.
- [35:13]
Serena Smith
I'm not waiting that long for this landline that I haven't had for the last 20 years. I can't wait another month.
- [35:19]
Kat
Exactly. I mean, I get it. Instant gratification. Like, we're all so used to getting things so quickly now, so we would always give refunds, no questions asked, especially in a case like that. But I think, yeah, in, in most cases, people are like, just be honest. Like, just tell me what the timeline's going to be. If it's going to be next spring, tell me it's going to be next spring. The worst case scenario is if we just sweep it under the rug or we try not to address it. I think if any founder is thinking about doing the pre order model, which totally has its benefits, that is one thing that is absolutely paramount.
- [35:50]
Serena Smith
Oh, my God. It makes me think of the Brene Brown quote, clarity is kindness. You know, you had this sense because you had already developed this deep relationship with your community. Like, I just need to be upfront and honest with them from jump and never violate that relationship. And so it makes sense to me that then when you get to the point where you're saying, hey, there's a delay, they're like, like, oh, she's a real human being. I have a sense of the trajectory that they've been traveling, like, some of the issues that they've been dealing with.
- [36:18]
Kat
It's cool. Our goal was really genuinely to bring people along for the journey. We wanted our customers, our pre order customers especially to feel like they were building this right there with us. All of the videos, they were behind the scenes. They were in the warehouse. Like, we showed what actually building the business looked like and how we were testing products. And I made a video being like, like, what does it mean to get a sample from overseas and test that? Like, and I showed pictures. I'm like, this is what a sample looks like. It's hideous. It's got like this neon green light glowing in the background. And here's how we think about giving this feedback to the factory. But I think because we kind of brought people into the process and didn't try to. I think it's like this old way of thinking about business where it's like, we need to come across as like, very professional and we always have everything together. Otherwise, we never let them see you sweat. Exactly. The game has changed so much, especially with social media, where now it's like, no Actually, the more you bring people into the fold, the more they feel like they're part of the story and the more brand loyalty that they actually have with you.
- [37:18]
Serena Smith
To that end, how have you been gleaning and utilizing audience and customer feedback as you continue to iterate on these phones?
- [37:29]
Kat
The number one thing right now is that because we had this, like, large blast with social media, and so many of these people came from my following, the next question is, like, who are these people actually, besides just being Kat's followers? Like, are they parents? Are they young people? Are they individual contributors at Fortune 500 companies? Like, what's the actual shape of these people? And so we've been doing a series of basically deep dive customer interviews with people to understand both the kind of demographics and psychographics, but also, like, what were their real true motivations for purchasing the physical phone? Was it it aesthetic and design, or was it something else? And so that's what we're getting to the bottom of.
- [38:11]
Serena Smith
Oh, my God. Yeah. I was thinking about this because I'm thinking, like, nostalgia is such a powerful sales tool. And for me too, like, I grew up on landlines, so the physical phone, I mean, the rotary is really beautiful and it's one thing, but the other one that you have, that's like the 90s phone that we all had, the
- [38:30]
Kat
handset, that's my favorite.
- [38:31]
Serena Smith
If we were, like, lucky enough to have that in our own bedroom, that was like, pink or red with, like, the curlicue cord. Like, I saw that and it, like, had, like, a physical reaction to it. I was like, oh, yeah, I want that. You know, reminds you of being 16 or whatever. Right.
- [38:45]
Kat
And you can actually use it. That's the crazy part is, like, it's not just a prop. You can take your real calls on it.
- [38:51]
Serena Smith
Right.
- [38:51]
Kat
That's the craziest part.
- [38:53]
Serena Smith
Right, Right. But then I'm like, is this also resonating with, like, Gen Z, for whom landlines are truly, like, a thing that they've maybe never actually engaged with?
- [39:04]
Kat
It is. That was probably one of the most surprising things about it for me. I expected the generation who grew up with landlines, like, older Gen Z, young millennial, mid millennial. It definitely surprised me when catcalls, the livestreams that I mentioned. We had, like, 8th grade, 9th grade girls calling in and being like, I just think it's really cute. And I've seen them in movies or TV shows, and I really want to call my friends on these things because they have smartphones, you know, and so they're like, I just want to pair it up with. With a physical phone. Yeah, that was a huge surprise to me as well.
- [39:38]
Serena Smith
Do you speak to those customer segments differently?
- [39:42]
Kat
I think we could do a better job of speaking to them differently right now. It's kind of all in one because the main customer acquisition source for us since we started, like, six to seven months ago was my social media channels. And. And it's hard for me to delineate between different groups in that way besides just, like, posting one video. And I've posted videos where I'm like, here's what you should get your daughter for Christmas. That's obviously speaking to an older demographic. And then I'll do another one that's, you know, maybe a little bit more of like a Gen Z trend that's speaking to a younger demographic, but in terms of, like, segmenting them and I think targeting the messages differently, that's something we're starting to get into now. That is yet another, like, new frontier for me and my team to try to learn for the first time.
- [40:21]
Serena Smith
I know you're in the midst of the deep dive on who your customers are in these demographics, but is there anything else really interesting that's, like, coming to the fore?
- [40:29]
Kat
Oh, I think probably the most interesting thing to me was that the majority of our most devoted customers knew exactly who they wanted to call when they purchased their physical phone.
- [40:41]
Serena Smith
Oh, my God.
- [40:41]
Kat
Like, they're not just buying it in a vacuum and being like, this is cute. I want it. For me, there's like, I want this phone so that I can call my boyfriend, so that I can call my mom, so that I can call my sister, you know, And I think that that is so compelling from a brand perspective, but it also directly impacts how we think about merchandising and selling.
- [40:59]
Serena Smith
Totally.
- [41:00]
Kat
Because maybe there is a bundle offer situation, and the way that we talk about it in the social and the marketing materials can directly reflect that fact that it's like, we actually understand you're probably thinking about this for you and someone else. So what if we did a buy one, get one or something like that?
- [41:15]
Serena Smith
Who do you call on it?
- [41:17]
Kat
I call my mom and my sister a lot. Yeah, they're the ones I probably talk to the most. I sort of have this routine now where on, like, Sunday nights, you know, before the week really starts, I'm, like, really invested in this whole, like, getting off my phone and trying to be a little bit more tactile. So I subscribe to a Sunday paper. I physically get the newspaper delivered to My place.
- [41:37]
Serena Smith
I did this for a year during
- [41:38]
Kat
COVID It's the best. Yeah, it's awesome. And I go out and I pick up the paper and I make a cup of coffee and I sit in my little reading nook and, and I read the paper and then I call
- [41:47]
Serena Smith
my mom and doesn't that feel like luxury today?
- [41:51]
Kat
Oh, my God, I feel like a million bucks. It's the best thing. And I think, honestly, luxury is the right word. Like the flap in our inside of our, of our retail box says offline is the new luxury. Because what a blessing it is to actually be able to like, put the world down for a moment and just like breathe and be present. And in many ways that's really what we're selling. Right? It's like we're selling Bluetooth landline phones. Yes. But we're offering people the opportunity to like, slow down for a second and like, touch grass and reconnect with someone who maybe they haven't talked to in a while.
- [42:24]
Serena Smith
From an identity perspective when this happened and the response was so profound and you found that there was this, like, fire lit under you that you were not anticipating. Was there any piece of you that was like, oh my God, like, I'm a founder now?
- [42:42]
Kat
Actually, no, I would say the, the feeling for me was more like I felt like an athlete. And it was like, oh, it's go time. Like, it's game time. Like, we're locked in. I was so excited. I love getting just like really tunnel visioned on a goal. And to me, the goal was very simple. We need to ship these phones before Christmas. And we made it. I have to say, for the record, I'm very proud of this. We made it by one day. We literally got all of the original pre orders for the rotary phones delivered to the furthest destination, which for us was the east coast by Christmas Eve. We kind of paid out the nose for it because you have to like, air freight stuff from Asia and all that kind of stuff. But it was so worth it. And I think to be able to deliver on that promise for the Christmas holiday, which so many of our original pre orders were Christmas gifts, was just, I mean, the best feeling ever. But no, I, I wasn't, I. I know that I'm an entrepreneur at heart. Founder, to me, for whatever reason, still feels like a label that I'm like, I think because it feels loaded from that time in Silicon Valley being like, oh, no, a founder is someone who like, raises $5 million in seed capital from, you know, a VC like that's not me, but being entrepreneurial, being scrappy. Oh yeah, that's like I'm just constantly ripping experiments. And so when this one worked, I was more excited than anything else.
- [43:59]
Serena Smith
Right. And you said that you have not elected into the CEO role. Somebody else is in the CEO role, which indicates to me that's in part because you want to keep yourself open, to be able to do other things. What have you got brewing?
- [44:15]
Kat
Yeah. So Josh, who took over the CEO role, he was an early member of the the kind of founding team with physical phones since very early on. He helped out with the development of the product and working with operations and whatnot. So I knew that the company would be in great hands when I essentially offered him the position to run the day to day of the business. But as you pointed out, I originally started in this as a content creator. And for me, I've taken a couple of different turns in my life where I've gone more into the product or tech direction. But I always feel most at home when I'm in the seat of like making the videos and making the content. And so I felt it would be a disservice to the brand of physical phones to try to serve the lane that I was not best suited to serve and instead to still stay actively involved in the brand. But to actually come back to this place where I get to focus on my zone of genius, which is how do we use social media and AI to kind of figure out what this formula is? Because in many ways it feels like how physical phones started. Yes, there was timing and a stroke of luck, but at the same time there was a formula. It was creator distribution plus knowledge of new technologies and new AI tools. And I think when you bring those two pieces together with an attitude of like, let's just try lots of things and not be afraid to do experiments and fail. You create this environment where now all of a sudden you've got not one, not two, but three, four, five, six, seven, ten physical phones of all these different products that are potentially reaching out to different audiences across the Internet, but leveraging the same kind of like, content flywheel of distribution from a creator perspective. I'm actually starting a creator first product studio called Cat Labs. And we're basically going to be running this formula and testing out this theory over and over again, which is to say, how do we use creator distribution plus new AI tools to build amazing products and to bring the audience in on the process of building so people can download what we're making, test what we're making? And even buy what we're making, but feel truly part of that process every single time.
- [46:26]
Serena Smith
So working with other creators, other builders. Yeah.
- [46:29]
Kat
So who's to say, like long term there might be other creators, but I think in the beginning it'll mostly be leveraging my platform as Cat GPT for the creator distribution, but bringing other builders in to tinker and also just play with new tools. Because the space in technology is moving so fast. It's like, how do we possibly stay up to date with everything that's coming out? But if we sort of bring a lot of brains together, we can probably all keep up a little bit better.
- [46:54]
Serena Smith
On that front, do you have any advice for entrepreneurs? But also just all, all of us regular humans, it feels like there are new AI tools coming out every day. Sometimes it feels like they're coming out every few hours. In terms of like how to keep your arms wrapped around it without getting totally overwhelmed.
- [47:11]
Kat
I know, I know. It's. Believe me, first thing I want to say is just like, you're so not alone. And nobody who feels this way is alone. This is literally my full time job. And I am also like, how do I stay up to date with everything that's happening? What I will say is that I think there's a total misconception that in order to be on top of things with AI, you're using like 50 different tools in a day. We use one or two tools in the office on a regular basis and we just know how to use them really, really well. So it kind of goes back to earlier when I was mentioning the three different ways that we're using AI to speedrun the growth of physical phones and future ventures. It's way more about how we're using ChatGPT, how we're using Claude, which are the kind of two main frontrunners that I would point people to, and Gemini probably would be a close third to just really get the most out of those tools.
- [48:00]
Serena Smith
Go deep rather than broad.
- [48:01]
Kat
Yeah, exactly.
- [48:02]
Serena Smith
What do you think is your superpower?
- [48:04]
Kat
Oh man. I think my superpower is what most creators superpower is, which is being able to have a really finely tuned cultural antenna and being able to kind of tap into the zeitgeist online and understand what people want but probably can't name and being able to name it before they can and then kind of bring it to them on a silver potter and say like, I made this thing.
- [48:32]
Serena Smith
Okay, well then you have to close this out by telling me, what else do you think we're wanting?
- [48:36]
Kat
Oh my gosh actually, I think people want what I. What I just described, cat labs. I think right now people are like, okay, this AI thing kind of a lot. I feel like there's a moral dilemma. I feel like there's all sorts of reasons why it's like maybe evil and terrible and bad and gonna ruin the world. But then I'm also hearing that I can be like part of a permanent underclass if I don't catch up. So, like, what's all happening here? And I think what people want is someone to just get super tactical and super concrete and say, okay, look, there's a lot of information and a lot of hype flying in 10 different directions. What you and I actually know matters is what this stuff can do today. So instead of theorizing about what it could do or how it could impact the world, why don't we sit down and actually start using this stuff? And if it's possible to build a billion dollar business as a one person company, or if it's possible to speed run the launch of a new product, then let's actually do it. And instead of just talking about it in theory, we're going to screen record everything, we're going to take screenshots, we're going to save all of our prompts, and we're going to share the entire process with you so you can see exactly how we did it. Like zero gatekeeping. I think that's what people want.
- [49:51]
Serena Smith
Full demystification, 100%. Wow. I love it. Katie, you're a riot. Dude. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on the show and thanks as always to you guys for tuning in. Hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on a new episode and we'll see you next time.