Regardless. You must find a way to ship early and often. You will go under if you do not.
It helps to make a mental shift, and understand that the problem you are trying to solve is not related to features. You're trying to prove whether enough people want what you are building, and if so, what exactly it is they want (you will get it wrong the first time, and probably the second time too... this is why iterating fast with as many customers as possible is key).
Will the product be sort of crappy and missing all sorts of "essentials"? You bet. But, crappy code that does what people want and they will pay money for always, always beats an untested fully-engineered solution.
However its easy to get lost in such products. That why there is still a lot to be said for knowing your MVP. I fight this battle everyday.
Read Four Steps to the Epiphany and apply the process described therein. You'll be able to turn your feeling into an actual conviction.
I'd be very interested on any ideas about how to make deep innovation less risky. For shallow ones is "launch fast", but what to do when this one is not available?
Well, a lot of them have. Besides "you often can't" is not very helpful.
The question is whether it's more difficult because you started as shallow or not -- not whether it's not a 100% surefire way to make it.
I've been building something for 18 months now and whilst I could be proven completely wrong, I feel like I'm working on something people will want and I feel like getting it built right is the correct thing to do.
The thing I am building needs alot of bits and pieces to be in place and working in order to realise the original concept. The MVP and "release fast" line of thinking says "too long, get it out there", but this would result only in releasing software that doesn't do what I envisioned it doing - what would be the point of that?
I really think the opportunity going forward is to build products that are hard to build and require lots of work to implement the actual vision, but ultimately to come out with a product with deep value.
I like the idea of building something deep and technical and functional.
We shall know soon enough if I am right or wrong as I plan to release soon....