What tends to happen is a first immediate client is needed along with a couple of sales demo clients. This buys time for the business to see if it’s viable before we bring on complexity.
But I agree clones of a core system isn’t multi tenancy.
For what it’s worth I tend to tell clients we won’t be sustainable after 4-5 of these such clones.
For people considering the clone approach let me caution one issue that comes up about 90% of the time. A client will as for a custom feature and be willing to pay for it for that “one” clone. These divergences are allowed to happen because we aren’t multi-tenant yet. You need to work hard to educate during this phase so you don’t create too much work down the line when you finally consolidate and refactor.
Exactly! That's the point.
I agree that it is a completely valid approach, especially if you can afford it, but in my opinion it is just a single tenant application that can be easily spun up. For example, what if you want to manage all of your "tenants" within an admin interface. With a separate instance for all your tenants this is not really possible without additional development or a completely separate admin application.