How CatGPT sold $1M worth of landlines
Cat Goetze built her following by teaching people how to get real results out of AI. Then she used those same tools to launch Physical Phones: a Bluetooth landline designed to pull you off your screen.
This May, less than a year after launch, she crossed $1 million in sales, standing inside her own Shopify Spaces pop-up: a '90s-themed Soho shop stocked with landlines, free coffee, and a working phone booth. From her online store to that pop-up floor, Shopify runs the commerce side of Physical Phones, so Cat can focus on the product and the people buying it.
Physical Phones started with a question: how do you use technology without letting it use you? Shopify helped turn that idea into something real, and most importantly, scalable.
Learn how Cat built it here!
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An internet without teenagers is a dead internet
Attention is devotion, attention is power, attention is currency. Teenage girls are its most avid spenders — the forecasters of the cultural market.
In 1964, it was four boys from Liverpool: teenage girls found the Beatles before most of America knew their names, and screamed themselves hoarse at the airport and outside the television studios while the grown-ups looked on, baffled.
And the girl at the front of the line is, more often than the credits admit, a Black teen girl. Black teen girls have a particular genius for being first; The Renegade, the dance that defined early TikTok, was made by a fourteen-year-old named Jalaiah Harmon in her bedroom in Atlanta. Most of what gets filed as “Gen Z slang” or “TikTok language” — expressions like “clock that tea,” “period”, “it’s giving __” derive from Black girls and Black queer culture.
“Teen girls are an amazing predictor of what is going to eventually rise to mainstream success,” Lia Haberman, creator economy expert and former Spotlight guest, tells me.
“[Teen girls] spend more time and engage more deeply on these platforms than any other group, and they turn out for the things they love: they’re the ones that buy the merch, they buy the tickets, they show up to events. When they love something, they really invest in it."
What would happen if we kicked them off the internet?
This week, the British government announced that teens under 16 will be barred from major social platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and X, with enforcement expected in 2027.
@taylorlorenz We need to stop using industry-friendly PR terms like “age verification” and call it what it is: Digital ID
Australia made this move first, late last year, banning under-16s from ten platforms and ordering the companies to delete those accounts or face fines in the tens of millions of dollars. Within a month, the platforms had purged roughly 4.7 million accounts, and the prime minister declared the experiment a success.
But a large majority of banned teens were still reaching these platforms — a survey of 1,050 twelve-to-fifteen-year-olds found more than 60% of those who'd had accounts before the ban were still on at least one platform months later, while separate industry data put roughly a fifth of thirteen-to-fifteen-year-olds still on TikTok and Snapchat.
They were lying about their age, borrowing a relative's ID, fooling the facial-age scanners, or slipping the block with a VPN — even as downloads of the apps the ban didn't cover, from Discord to Lemon8, spiked in the days right after it took effect.
A ban doesn't make teenagers disappear — or even protect them — so much as it scatters them into group chats, DMs, gaming servers, and uncovered apps with far less moderation and far less visibility.
It also pulls teens out of the open, legible spaces where brands, media, and the rest of us currently read the first signals of what's coming.
“The effect won't be immediate. Any 13, 14, 15 year old that has an account now will either not give it up … they'll create finstas […] the real impact lands three, four, five years down the road, once those younger tweens and teens come of age, where they would have logged onto social media, but they don't."
Where the cool kids hang out
For most of the last century, you could find out what teen girls were thinking from magazine racks.
Sassy, the feminist outlier of its time, ran from 1988 to 1996. YM closed in 2004; ElleGirl and Teen People both ended their print runs in 2006; CosmoGIRL folded in 2008 and was absorbed into Seventeen, which swallowed Teen the following year. Teen Vogue outlasted nearly all of them before ending its print edition in 2017 — and then, last fall, Condé Nast folded it into VOGUE.
Lia calls this collapse the flattening: once advertisers could reach a teenager and her mother in the same feed, funding a magazine aimed only at the teenager no longer made sense. "We can reach everyone through Instagram or TikTok," she tells me, speculatively, "so we're no longer going to invest money in advertising that targets teen girls specifically."
The feed-based platforms are built with teen girls in mind. Lia has a shortcut for evaluating whether a new platform actually matters … that is largely about whether or not teens care about it:
Watch what the platforms ship. New features show where a company is placing its chips. "[Mosseri] has been very blatant and transparent about the fact that they are laser focused now on Gen Z," Haberman tells me, so whatever Instagram is pushing is a fair proxy for what's landing with teens.
In practice, that means skimming the platform newsrooms when something drops (Instagram's @creators, TikTok's newsroom) and noting what gets prime placement and what's built for self-expression: Instagram Notes, the standalone Edits app, and the relentless Reels push were all tells about who Meta is chasing. The discipline that makes this work is to keep moving and not stay loyal to the version of a platform you came up on.
Follow a few large teen creators. Not random teenagers, but the big accounts with millions of followers, where you're just one more face in the audience. The move is to study how they make things: the length of the cut, the hook in the first second, the text-on-screen style, and the sound they use before it charts. When the same format shows up across several large teen accounts in the same week, that's the trend crossing over before it reaches your feed.
Lia does this herself to keep up with the references and the editing grammar, and an account like Salish Matter — someone with enough pull to land a tween beauty line at Sephora — is exactly the kind worth watching.
Ask the teens in your life. Build a small, informal panel — students, younger siblings, nieces and nephews — and ask sharper questions than "what's cool?"
Which apps they've stopped opening (abandonment is the earliest signal of all), what sound is suddenly everywhere on their feed, what's gone cringe.
Better still, ask one of them to scroll their FYP in front of you for two minutes.
"It wasn't until a student told me these seven-to-nine-second videos with text on screen and music and b-roll are killing it, that had been happening for a good six months before it ever got onto my radar. If a student hadn't told me about it, I wouldn't have known."
Casey Lewis, former Spotlight guest and creator of After School, a daily-ish youth trends newsletter, watched the flattening from inside the building.
@salish i’m so excited 🩷
She'd grown up obsessed with teen magazines and landed a role at Teen Vogue, only to find the work being hollowed out in real time — carefully reported stories sinking while "Kylie Jenner dyes her hair" headlines pulled the Facebook traffic.
Youth media, she’d told us, is "tricky, tricky, tricky" right now.
Teenagers will always continue inventing new language, aesthetics, communities, and obsessions — there is no way to fully extricate them from the internet.
But, the more we remove teen girls from mainstream visibility, pushing them to the corners of our digital spaces, we lose one of the upstream sources of cultural experimentation — and our ability to understand where culture is heading.
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