How an AI Expert Built the Most Analog Product of 2026

24:44Like, 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. 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 going to happen overnight? 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.

25:19We 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? 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.

25:59They were the first 1 ,000 to put their money down when there was no real supply chain set up yet. So the amount of trust that these particular 1 ,000 people had put in me as a founder was paramount. And I wasn't going to do anything to risk that. So we communicated through all channels pretty much constantly throughout the first round of production. 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. None. Yeah. I mean, that sounds like an incredibly steep learning curve. Yes. What did it take to get that initial run produced?

26:36Yeah. 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. And so yeah, I was like, I got to 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.

27:13And, 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.

27:49Like 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. 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. It's a phone, right? And then you get into it and you're like, oh no, wow, there's like a thousand things that I didn't consider. Like what elements of being deep in the details really surprised you? Dude, 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.

28:27It'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.

29:04I mean, I would hope you are. Yeah, 100%. So 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. Can you give me an example? 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.

29:36And 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 was heading up product at the time, has since been promoted to the CEO. He went back to the factory and said, look, we got to fix this.

30:04And 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 like technical workaround. I think it's called like HFP or something like that. And he just sort of like 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. Wow. 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.

30:34Are there other ways that you're incorporating AI as cat GPT that you can share with us that might be of utility to our founder audience? 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.

31:12And 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.

31:44and 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. 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. Yeah. Okay. 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, meatier problems.

32:26So 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, a 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 just a chatbot.

33:09The 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 like SOPs. It's going to take hours and hours and hours and hours. Now it's happening in a matter of moments. Yeah. 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? Yeah, exactly. That's the way to leverage it. 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.

33:51And 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. AI can't teach us how to have comfort with stillness. That's like, that's its own thing, but it's 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.

34:35Who wants to wait for anything these 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. And how did people respond? Totally fine. Honestly, we, listen, we had some contingent of people who would come back and say, I'm not waiting that long.

35:07I'd like my money back. And we gave refunds in like 24 hours flat. No more. 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. 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 most cases, people are like, just be honest. Like, just tell me what the timeline is 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.

35:43I 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. 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 up front 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 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 it's cool Our goal was really genuinely to bring people along for the journey.

36:23We 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. We showed what actually building the business looked like and how we were testing products. And I made a video being like, what does it mean to get a sample from overseas and test that? 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.

37:03Otherwise, we might lose customer trust. Never let them see a 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. To that end, how have you been gleaning and utilizing audience and customer feedback as you continue to iterate on these phones? 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?

37:44Are they parents? Are they young people? Are they individual contributors at Fortune 500 companies? 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 what were their real, true motivations for purchasing the physical phone? Was it aesthetic and design or was it something else. And so that's what we're getting to the bottom of. 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.

38:22So 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 nineties phone that we all had. If we were like lucky enough to have that in our own bedroom that was like pink or red with like the curly Q cord. Like I saw that and it like, I 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. 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. That's the craziest part. 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.

39:04It 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 Cat Calls, the live streams that I mentioned, we had like eighth grade, ninth 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 a physical phone. Yeah, that was a huge surprise to me as well.

39:37Do you speak to those customer segments differently? 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 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 maybe a little bit more of like a Gen Z trend that's speaking to a younger demographic.

40:10But 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. 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? 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. Oh my God. Like they're not just buying it in a vacuum and being like, this is cute.

40:43I 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. And I think that that is so compelling from a brand perspective, but it also directly impacts how we think about merchandising and selling. 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? Who do you call on it?

41:16I 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. I did this for a year during 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 I read the paper and then I call my mom.

41:47And doesn't that feel like luxury today? 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 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 landland 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 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?

42:41Actually, no. I would say 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.

43:24And 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 wasn't, 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.

43:55And so when this one worked, I was more excited than anything else. Right. And you said that you have not elected into the CEO role. Somebody else is in the CEO role. Yeah. 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? Yeah. So Josh, who took over the CEO role, he was an early member of 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.

44:36But 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 like 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?

45:15Because 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, 10 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.

45:58I'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. So working with other creators. Other builders. Yeah. 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 Catch EPT 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.

46:45It'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. On that front, do you have any advice for entrepreneurs, but also just 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. I know. I know. Believe me, first thing I want to say is just like, you're so not alone and nobody who feels this way is alone.

47:17This 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, you know, speed run 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 front runners that I would point people to, and Gemini probably would be a close third, to just really get the most out of those tools.

47:59Go deep rather than broad. Yeah, exactly. What do you think is your superpower? 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 platter and say like, I made this thing. Okay. Well, then you have to close this out by telling me what else do you think we're wanting? Oh my gosh. Actually, I think people want what I just described, Cat Labs.

48:42I think And 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 going to 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.

49:19So 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.

49:50Full demystification. 100%. Wow. I love it. Kat, you're a riot, dude. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming on the show. This is a blast. 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. Oo Yeah