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You have an idea for a product: a gadget, a part, something you'd sell to your own customers. AI tools now promise to design it for you in an afternoon. So why not design it, raise the money and get it made?
Because that's the path where people lose their savings. Three questions decide whether you will. Can AI really design it? Where does the money actually go? And what's the cheapest way to find out?
It can draft it. That's not the same thing.
On tests that check whether an AI-designed circuit board actually works, not just whether the design file opens, the best result passed 8.15% of the time. In one documented attempt, an AI nearly picked a timer chip that can't run on the coin battery it was meant to use. A person and a rule-checker caught it.
So the obvious plan, letting the AI design it and sending it to a factory, fails at the first step. What looks cheap is the drawing. What still costs money is checking it.
The second obvious plan is to crowdfund it. That's where the losses are.
In one study of successful Kickstarter projects in design and technology, only 24.9% delivered on time. The founders blamed manufacturing, shipping and certification, not design. Quirky and Shapeways, two companies built to make other people's products at scale, both went bankrupt.
If you take backers' money before you've made one working unit, you're promising something nobody has checked. If it's late, it's your name and your savings on the line.
Anything that needs investors before you've made one working thing. The money in this field is going to large factory companies (one raised $1.37 billion in August 2026), not to one-person shops. I found no small team doing well at it yet, which isn't the same as there being none.
Make something small you'd use yourself first, not a product.
A small circuit board is advertised from $2 for five, with assembly from an $8 setup fee (one vendor's starting prices). Design it with an AI, and run the free checks before ordering: the design-rule check, a simulation and the vendor's own manufacturability check. Write down what each one caught.
Read the costs before you click. If you're in the US, tariffs on Chinese parts ran from about 35% to 92.5% as of March 2026, by one vendor's own FAQ.
Then order the smallest batch they allow. Nobody has measured how often first orders go wrong, so your notes will answer the question nobody else has.
The full research, with every figure and source, is here. If your first order goes wrong in an interesting way, I'd like to hear about it: mackenzie@mackenziebowes.com or @_mackenziebowes.
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