Ask HN: Any product inventors or creators here?

I've designed, developed, and released multiple video games, and designed several (not yet unreleased) board games.

One of my board game designs is licensed by another company. Another game was a finalist in a popular annual board game design contest, although it hasn't lead to any publishers licensing it yet.

I have not yet decided to bring any board games to market myself, although I've been tempted due to struggles with finding publishers willing to license my game designs.

For the video games, they went alright. Some were played millions of times, but they were also free games so I didn't make any money directly from them. One video game was a finalist in a contest and won me about $5,000 worth of prizes.

Another one was a first place winner in a game contest which got me a $5,000 check (it was a small Flash game I made in about 20 hours worth of work, so pretty good ROI there).

The games I released and charged money for, so far, haven't made a whole lot of money. But I also didn't know hardly anything about marketing back then either (and I'm still not great at it).

I've played around with A.I. to help with generating some ideas for features or items to add to my games, and I tried using it to help code a couple simple systems as an experiment (like something that handles the rumble in controllers), but I'm back to using pretty much no A.I. I found myself fighting the A.I. to get it to generate what I wanted without issues too much to be worth it for anything more than something really simple.

A couple times since I have asked it a technical question and it's helped give ideas on how to resolve the issue, though. So it's not like it has no use for me, but it hasn't been super useful yet. I can't wait until I can get away with just specifying the design of a product, like a product manager, and it comes up with the rest though. That seems pretty far away still, though.

Here's something that I wished existed. After getting a 3D printer, and learning modeling software, I'm constantly creating "stuff" that doesn't exist in any store, but satisfy needs I've had around the house. Now there are 3D model hosting sites where you can sell downloads of your model file. And there are 3D printing farms where you can have them crank out and ship you any quantity of your models. I want that combined into one B2B entity where I can place a listing for one of my products on something like Ebay or Amazon. Then when a customer orders it, have it fulfilled by the 3D print farm company, package it up with my product instructions, and ship it out to the customer (and once volume hits a certain level, maintain inventory at Amazon for example). They collect payment and send me the difference between my sell price and their manufacturing price, with automatic price breaks when volume hits a specific level.

Objects that I've designed and 3D printed for myself include things like Dremel tool attachments, dust port attachments for my router table, nut/washer holders that you screw on the bottom of a table to hold the nut in place (so you can move a top post from one location to another as needed without reaching under the table to hold onto the nut), things like that. Some small items, some larger mechanical devices.

The closest I've seen to this is some woodworkers on Youtube run their own store and have a small number of 3D printers for cranking out the products they sell. I want something like this scaled up for any designer.

Hey guys! We're engineers/designers from France, and we've built the Ultimate DIY Battery that you can repair and refill!

Check our founder video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsuW1NPkvNk

And a presentation of the battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLoCihE0eIA

Features are:

- Ride Sustainably with the World's First Repairable Battery

- Refillable in 5 minutes (just buy $150 worth of new cells every 3 years or so, when they're depleted)

- Be Worry-Free thanks to the Fireproof Casing! There's been waaaaaay too many lithium fires!

It's launching as a Kickstarter in September and there is an offer for early-backers here https://get.gouach.com/1 for a 25% discount on the battery!

Follow us here: https://www.instagram.com/gouach.batteries/

I market a physical product, but it's a weekend business. Something like a guitar pedal. No patents or other IP -- too expensive, and the protection is limited anyway. It's an analog circuit based on textbook design elements. No advertising, just word-of-mouth on web forums, and a web page. I build and ship from my basement.

The idea came from the fact that I'm a musician myself and tied into the community of players, who share their experiences and pain points on web forums. And an intimate understanding of electronics, physics, and small scale manufacturing.

All of my other inventions belong to my daytime employer -- about 20 patents so far. Since I'm plugged into a large business, I have access to market intelligence and at the same time a good understanding of the technical side of things. Plus, I can prototype virtually anything, so I'm less dependent on permission or having a formal plan to start making something.

I invent something practically every day and I record the best ideas for the future. For example, one of my inventions from the 2000s was car displays on discs which I tried to implement and even bought a car for, but nothing came of it due to the toxicity of the people I was working with at the time. The idea was stolen, sold, implemented, and stolen again multiple times while I was trying to find co-founders. The ideas I didn't talk about were never realized, while those I did mention were immediately copied, including an installation at Burning Man. I think I was ahead of my time, before AI became mainstream. I don't use AI much now, but I think soon AI will replace all our old technologies.

I invented and brought to market a physical product. There is some 'AI' in the product, but all the tech was hand-crafted. We sold the IP on post-covid when were having huge difficulty raising further investment.

(You may also want to take a look at factory.london that I am involved with, with the aim of easing the creative journey!)

Infomercials have promised this kind of service for decades.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Execution of something good is hard and fairly unique. If it weren't, then there's little or no defensibility to it and probably not a good business.

I design and build GPS-synched moon phase clocks (“LunaKron”) & other electronic novelties, and sell them on Etsy.

I’ve consulted with ChatGPT when I need help choosing materials and with some techniques.

Where can we follow this/you?