With Ansible, Mike already had a successful prototype (func) which had been developed and used by the Fedora infrastructure team for a while. He then left Red Hat and worked on Ansible. So he did in fact already know what the customer wanted! However that's an unusual case for a start-up. https://opensource.com/article/21/2/ansible-origin-story
Based on my experience func and ansible aren't very comparable and it's hard to call func a prototype for ansible. My recollection is that it was much more of a disruption to puppet, chef, and saltstack that had all become much more complicated and heavyweight by that time.
What I took away from this article is that an expert in that space (DeHaan) knew there was a gap and opportunity in this area, and the point of this article is that because he was able to capitalize on that opportunity because of his existing expertise and familiarity.
It's an interesting view compared to some interpretations of lean startups.
I think in that case you're not building a minimum viable product because that's already happened. The MVP was what Ansible was when the Fedora team were using it. When Mike left to form a company around the product it was much more than that - because there was already a really good understanding of what people would pay for.
