Minimum Viable State (MVS) - startup frameworks for statecraft

In startups there's this concept of MVP - Minimum Viable Product - the most bare bones version of a product that you can release while still providing value to people.

I've been thinking on whether there is Minimal Viable State - I'm very narrow offer of what the state provides, but better. For example: healthcare - an MVP of this would be maybe a meal prep service, or fat camp, or some other health provider.

The thinking behind this is: what are the steps to take that allow you to take other steps in the future to take more and more of the role of state. And in the future, doing the final step, which would be provide security (have the monopoly over violence).

May be providing MVS could serve as a campaign slash marketing about your small group of people are actually competent at running a state slash city - and use this as leverage to then run for elections on an actual city.

I'm borrowing some ideas from medieval statescraft in which a king, before giving his heir the keys of the kingdom, would send him to war to prove himself. If the prince died in this military campaign, then at least the kingdom wouldn't get an incompetent king. But by winning the military campaign is one step to prove to his father that he is the rightful heir of the kingdom.

Is there a way in which a small group of men can take these small campaigns so that we prove to the general public that we are the rightful people to rule a place?

To crown this angle outside of military, I'd frame it as business. If I was running a multi-billion dollar company and I was thinking of giving that company to my son, I would have him prove himself first by running a difficult business that has low margins, like a restaurant or a hotel. By proving himself in this small military campaign, I would be more confident that he can inherit an entire multi-billion dollar business.

Are there ways in which we can build a minimal viable state so that we can prove to people that we should be in positions of power? So the masses realize that having us running a state would be beneficial for them?

I've thought about this a fair amount, and it is a very difficult problem. I've thought about it in terms of creating a city as startup, or finding people to do a takeover of an existing city. Here are the main roadblocks:

1. Other lines of business do not translate well to running a city or running a state. Excellence in leadership requires domain expertise and that does not translate between lines of business. Certain very basic management skills may translate, but a lot of stuff won't translate. It will be like moving from running Coke, to running Apple. Or running Space-X to running DOGE.
2. A basic necessity of a startup city or startup state is an economy that actually provide jobs and taxable funds. Unfortunately, having an economy at wages that will attract talented people requires employers that can find a niche in the ultra-high-tech globalized value-chain. Connecting to that value-chain means connecting to regulations, trade agreements civil rights law, etc. It requires marketing that ties in with the zeitgeist of the global empire. Without that, you are are North Korea.
3. Politically, very difficult to do hostile takeovers of failed cities, the way you can do a hostile takeover of a failed company. The laws simply do not allow it.
4. Most cities are based on "Cathedral" jobs (education, regulation, insurance, healthcare) and as long as China is willing to make manufactured goods for so cheap, it is not actually in the interests of anyone living in the city to change the economy to something else. You could imagine some "based" GMU-school inspired administration that would cut healthcare and education in half while increasing quality ... and what does that get you? Just a lot of people out of jobs. And it's not even saving the city money, since that stuff is all being funded from the imperial funds.

One thought: there is that group trying to do a startup city out in California. Anyone know anything about them? Looks interesting. If I was younger and more mobile, I would consider joining them and finding a way to prove myself.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, this program seems to be another attempt at fine-tuning some version of what has happened in most industrialized nations over the past forty years, with private firms or NGOs replacing failing state organs or their functions. Unfortunately, those who make a killing running, say, a private prison, school, military, or hospital—or replicating some function of these things—have few incentives to challenge the remains of the state, nor to build an effective replacement by expanding into other sectors (the logic market-tested solutions would mean, anyway, that a more efficient cartel would swiftly replace them). On the other end of things, an NGO feeding shut-ins doesn't produce a scalable base of power.

Taking the proposal seriously, though: what you want looks more like an organized crime group than a meal-planning service.