ok, i'm trying to deploy a kubernetes cluster with nginx ingress that takes whole subdomains in. It won't deploy since there are no services in the cluster yet. I try to set up a dummy echo service, it won't fire because there's no nginx-ingress yet. is there some kind of skip verification option during deployments? I haven't found one.

What verification is the issue here?

it's either waiting for load balancer which does not exist yet if i deploy dummy echo service before nginx, or it times out during nginx-ingress-service deployment when it can't find pods to direct traffic to.

or it times out during nginx-ingress-service deployment when it can't find pods to direct traffic to

This sounds like the controller pods of nginx-ingress deployment aren't coming up healthy. Can you check with kubectl whether the ingress controller deployment is healthy?