The most dangerous moment in building a new product isn't the launch. It's the quiet second in the ideation stage when a voice in your head says, "That's a stupid idea," and you believe it. The discipline that separates people who create things from people who only consume them is small and unglamorous: give yourself permission to write the idea down anyway. Many of the products we can't live without today started as ideas someone almost laughed out of the room.

Product management, at its core, is about creation. Whether you buy an established business and spend your days iterating on it or you bring something genuinely new to market, you are creating either way — both are acts of bringing something into being. You have the idea, you develop it, you validate the market, you build it, you take it to market, and then you grow it as more people actually use and enjoy it. That whole arc is the work — and it maps almost exactly onto the three things I do at High Noon Product: vision, product management, and go-to-market. But I want to talk about just one stage of it, the very first one, because it's the stage where most good ideas quietly die.

Where It Started: A Scooter and a Silly Name

My product management story started in a marketing capstone class at Cal State Fullerton, where I earned a business degree with an emphasis in marketing. The final project was essentially a product management consulting engagement: after learning SWOT analysis, product development, and go-to-market strategy, my group had to create or iterate on a product, analyze it, and pitch it to the class as if we were pitching investors. It was the full lifecycle in miniature. I remember walking out of that room feeling light, happy, and completely aligned — that feeling of this is the thing I want to do.

The idea I pitched came from my own life. I drove a little 125cc Havana Classic scooter around campus, and every time I filled it up, the gas station nozzle didn't seat properly on the small tank. I couldn't click and lock it like you can on a car, so I'd stand there holding it, unable to tell when the tank was full — overfilling and spilling gas on the scooter, or underfilling and shorting myself. So I pitched my team a product: a gas pump nozzle adapter you'd keep in the scooter's storage compartment that let the pump lock and auto-stop just like it does on a car. I called it Schnozzle. Scooter nozzle. Schnozzle.

It's a silly name. It sounds a little dumb. And that's exactly the point. We built out the idea, ran the SWOT, and pitched it — and my professor stopped and asked, "Is this a real idea? Because this is actually kind of good. You might want to consider actually building this." That was nirvana. But notice the shape of the moment: right before that validation, I was sitting there wondering whether the whole thing was too stupid to say out loud.

The Voice That Kills Ideas

That's the stage I want to name. Somewhere between having the idea and developing it, an inner critic shows up and asks: Is this dumb? Does the name sound ridiculous? Is there even a market? Can you actually sell this? For a lot of people, that voice wins, and the idea never even gets written down.

Around that same time, I wandered into a Deseret Book in Tustin, California, and found a book by Richie Norton called The Power of Starting Something Stupid. His whole argument is that many of the products we use every day — some of them billion- and hundred-billion-dollar businesses — started as ideas that people discouraged, doubted, or outright called stupid. The book is about giving yourself permission to take those "stupid" ideas seriously, because they're often the viable, legitimate, wildly profitable ones in disguise.

Not long after, I heard James Altucher on a podcast talking about the same muscle from a different angle. His challenge is to become an "idea machine": carry a cheap notepad everywhere and write down ten new ideas every single day — business ideas, product ideas, marketing ideas, connection ideas, anything. The first few days, maybe the first month, most of them will be bad. That's fine. You're not trying to be right; you're training the muscle. Write them down anyway.

Building the Muscle

I still try to live by that. I keep a board for product ideas, and the very first column is just ideation — no filter, no judgment. Any time something lands, whether it's a genuine flash of inspiration, a download, or just a bad user experience where I think "this could be better if we did it this way," it goes on the board. That practice — capture first, judge later — is honestly the foundation on which I built High Noon and moved into doing product leadership for clients as an embedded product partner. The whole business rests on a habit of not discounting ideas too early.

Here's the cost of getting this wrong, from my own life. A few years ago I was thinking about the constraints on compute — the explosion of AI, the data centers being built at breakneck speed around the world, and the challenge of driving down the cost of compute while demand keeps climbing. A lightbulb went off: one of the biggest constraints is land. Real estate is a massive cost in standing up a data center. And my brain offered up, "Well, what if we built data centers in space?" But I heard that idea in my head in a goofy Peter Griffin voice — "space data" — and I literally laughed out loud. I thought it was dumb. I didn't put it on the board. I brushed it aside.

Then, over the next handful of years, I watched Sundar Pichai talk about the future of compute being data centers in space. I watched Elon Musk say the same thing. Now there's serious conversation about data centers on the Moon, processing in orbit, satellites beaming it back down — all to loosen exactly the land constraint I'd been thinking about. And I looked at that and thought, huh, that was actually a pretty good idea I threw away.

I'm not saying anyone stole anything — that's not it at all. Ideas are fluid. I believe they move through the ether, through the collective mind, and they land on whoever is willing to take them seriously. I had it in my hands and I said no, because it came out in a Peter Griffin voice. If I'd had the wherewithal to write it down and sit with it, I might have shown up as a thought leader on it early. Because I laughed instead, I missed that boat.

Why Genius Sounds Like a Joke

There's a line from John Mayer, in his live documentary Where the Light Is, that has stuck with me. He's talking about playing with his trio — Pino Palladino on bass and Steve Jordan on drums — musicians he considers flat-out geniuses. And he says that our first, natural human reaction to something that's genuinely genius, something pure that comes through a person, is often to laugh at it.

I think that's true, and it's the whole thing in a sentence. The laugh isn't proof an idea is stupid. Sometimes the laugh is the sound of a streak of genius arriving before your mind has caught up to it. That reflex to chuckle and dismiss is the exact same reflex that makes us call a good idea dumb.

So this is the permission I'd offer anyone at the start of the creation process: when your first instinct is to laugh, or the idea seems outlandish right out of the gate, don't discount it. Write it down. Develop it a little. Sit with why it came to you in the first place. It might be silly. It might also be the one that walks out of the room feeling light, happy, and aligned — the one your future self wishes you'd taken seriously.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is "the power of starting something stupid"?

It's the idea, from Richie Norton's book of the same name, that many hugely successful products and businesses began as ideas people dismissed as stupid, risky, or embarrassing. The "power" is in giving yourself permission to take those ideas seriously and act on them instead of talking yourself out of them.

How do you get better at generating product ideas?

Treat ideation as a muscle, not a lightning strike. James Altucher's practice is to write down ten new ideas a day, every day — most will be bad, and that's the point. Capture every idea without judging it first: keep a running list, add to it constantly, and revisit later. The volume and the no-filter capture are what build the habit.

Why do good product ideas often sound stupid at first?

Because our instinctive reaction to something novel — or even genuinely brilliant — is often to laugh or doubt it, the same reflex John Mayer describes toward true genius. A new idea has no proof, no precedent, and sometimes a ridiculous name, so the inner critic labels it "stupid" before it's had a chance to be developed. The laugh is a signal to slow down and look closer, not to throw the idea away.

If you're sitting on an idea you keep talking yourself out of, that's usually the one worth taking seriously. That's the stage where I love to work — turning a "stupid" idea into a real product with vision, product management, and go-to-market behind it. Let's talk about what you're trying to build.