The hottest phone in America right now is a $100 landline with no screen. Tin Can launched in April 2025, sold out batch after batch, and has moved hundreds of thousands of units. Greylock led their $12M seed in December. The three founders came out of a Seattle real estate startup that shut down the year before. The product is anti-tech. The growth engine is pure Silicon Valley. Calls between Tin Cans are free. Calling regular phone numbers runs about $8 a month per line. So every family that buys one immediately starts recruiting other families, because the phone gets more useful and cheaper with every friend who joins. A referral loop, dressed up as a toy. Then they went after schools. Tin Can gave 300 families at one school free phones. In week one those kids logged 1,500 calls and 75 hours of talk time. The average kid in that community now has close to 30 Tin Can contacts, and kids there have called each other 29 of the last 30 days. The lock-in works on parents too. Once your kid's entire friend group is on Tin Can, you're not canceling, and you're in no rush to hand them an iPhone either. Tin Can figured out the stickiest part of a smartphone is the friend list. They kept the friend list and threw out everything else.