With nothing more than a design, amateurs can manufacture jewelry, robots, T-shirts, furniture–anything. No warehouses. No minimum orders. And no money down.

Thousands are launching instant businesses. Zazzle, of Redwood City, California, offers a dizzying array of user-designed products from posters to tennis shoes. Spreadshirt, founded in Leipzig, Germany, hosts 500,000 individual T-shirt shops.

“These companies significantly lower the threshold for someone to bring anything to market,” says Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. “There’s an industrial-age bias that you need volume to support a factory; but with this, much-more-creative low-volume businesses become viable.”