Cat Goetze may be a tech founder, but she’s on a years’ long journey to reduce her reliance on devices.
Two years ago Goetze, who goes by CatGPT on social media, wanted to swap her smartphone for something more low-tech.
“I was kind of just sitting around [thinking] it’d be so cute if we still had landline phones and you could twirl the cord and talk with your friends,” she tells CNBC Make It. “That just felt nostalgic and chic to me.”
Looking into it, she didn’t realize getting a landline for her apartment would require getting a new number and paying for a phone line. So, the 20-something zillennial built her own version from a phone she thrifted: “I literally just hijacked a landline phone and made it Bluetooth compatible.”
The pink clamshell handset quickly became the most talked-about feature in her apartment. Whenever someone buzzed into her building’s security system, Goetze would let them in from her landline. She could also place outgoing calls from the set.
