I’ll spend some more time replying to this next week, so circle back to this comment; I’m someone who regularly helps people get past these audits, meet the criteria customers are trying to assess with these certifications, and vet startups who don’t have these certifications or budget.
Then read through it and see what you can address immediately (EDR on your laptop, MFA on your cloud environments, etc), followed by role playing your client; “based on answers to this questionnaire, what would I not accept?”
There will be some items you can’t fix.
You’ll soon find out the majority of customers, including banks, governments, defence contractors, crypto startups — simply do not care. If they want to use your product, they’ll work with you.
It may be single-tenancy, it may require architectural changes, it may mean making it selfhosted with a time-bomb, but you’ll be able to address the requirements of the CISO, compliance monkey or executive.
I’ve yet to meet an industry or individual I can’t convince. Even if the product is a hot mess, half baked and radioactive — we’ll deploy it on a VM running inside of a VDI within the customer’s environment, because slopping together a migration path is _so easy_, and those early, highly regulated clients are worth it.
Major problem of entire compliance/auditing industry is not enough asking in companies "what are the actual risks we are dealing with", "what's the goal for given control", "do we have alternative control ensuring that".
Compounded by cheap shitty auditors that just mark down checkboxes on a worksheet
No worries, it’s more about finding what the security and compliance teams care about — and making them comfortable. Compliance doesn’t equal security, I’ve onboarded startups with better security than the SOC2 certified, ISO27K Swiss cheese $B unicorn.
Hackers don’t target based on certification. It’s generally convenience and motive. Unknown startups who are laying solid foundations won’t show up on anyone’s radar for the first 2 years without some insanely unlucky event (i.e supply chain breach, an early employee doing something really dumb).
I'm currently at a small startup trying to do ISO 27001. A big issue we run into is that there simply aren't enough people. For example, the processes are built around having one person who writes code, and another person who reviews the written code. That's obviously impossible as a solo dev. You also need an internal auditor, who obviously needs to be separate from the operations team.
If I recall correctly the minimum in a standard setup is 9 roles which cannot overlap. You're going to have a very hard time doing that as a solo entrepreneur, so you'll probably need to find someone who is experienced in making unusual setups like these compliant - which isn't going to be cheap. Even after that there's a pretty decent chance you'll end up needing to hire 3rd-party services in order to be compliant: our "internal" auditor is just some big firm doing it for us.
We are a team of 1 developer and 1 sales/marketing and are fully certified. You can hire an external auditor for the internal audit. We have AI code reviews, so we don’t need an extra developer.
I was part of several third party risk management audits from a corporate perspective.
We regularly audited and questioned SMBs (and big corps) with regards to their security posture. We knew that small shops wouldn’t be able to be fully compliant to SOC2 Type 2 or have an ISO27001 certified environment. If it was clear that our business wanted the product, we either tried to help the company with the questionnaire or created a risk report that was then signed by the business. In other words: even if your customer asks you to be compliant, you don’t have to be if they care enough about your product.
If you seem intent on getting things right, that’s a big plus. Most of your competitors don’t even know what SOC 2 is.
Can this also be done for HIPAA and FERPA, or for those compliance requirements is the process the way to go and just filling out the questionnaire would not be sufficient?
SOC2 is, at the end of the day, a voluntary compliance standard. HIPAA and FERPA requirements are federal law. Waiving those requirements would not just mean accepting additional liability, but would normally make your customer ineligible to receive federal funds, which are typically a substantial chunk of revenue.
I've seen a small company do a SOC2 where the "CEO" seems to be
the only actual employee..
Its a lot of paperwork but it is supposed to scale for company size
so you could dismiss with a lot of the separation if the CEO accepts
risks and perhaps relies on a fair amount of external systems that are
already certified and has some contractors for specific tasks etc.
It’s a disadvantage for sure but not usually a blocker.
They often have security questionnaires you can complete instead. Or, as part of signing with them, you can promise to get SOC2 by x date (which will hopefully be easier with the funds from an enterprise contract).
I’d recommend looking online at some example security questionnaires or the types of things soc2 covers and writing an internal security doc for yourself so you know your position on everything and don’t have to scramble when it comes to it.
You can. It just means that the customer has to do the proper analyses and risk evaluation for their own SOC2 (or ISO 27001 or whatever) certification.
Just focus on providing a good value application and be frank about what you do, why you can't get certification for something like that, but that you can answer any questions they might have for their own certification process.
If the potential customer makes 'has SOC2' a requirement, than that is not a customer for you, in the same way that 'has more than 20 employees' rules you out.
Like it or not, having a bus factor of 1 is a pretty big risk. You are a giant single-point-of-failure, which means that operations-wise you are a far riskier option to your customers than a significantly larger competitor.
As others suggested, as a solo entrepreneur, I recommend not entering this process without a real justification.
I passed this SOC 2 type for my startup after securing a deal with a big client.
SOC 2 is an ongoing process that involves many documents and workflows you will need to implement in your company.
If your clients really insist on proof of security compliance, I will try to find a local PT authority to complete a one-time process with them to obtain this kind of report.
Definitely possible. Start with SOC2-aligned practices and a solid public security page — many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate itself.
Do they? Every time I've been asked about SOC compliance, it turned out the underlying reason was either insurance or a requirement the customer had from their downstream customer. Neither of those cases would be negotiable, the customer's insurance company only cares about a checkbox that "All vendors are SOC2 compliant and relevant documentation is on file".
That said, actually being SOC compliant isn't that hard aside from the paperwork aspect. Any competent firm should already be doing all the things required, it's the bare minimum for security. There really shouldn't be any code or process changes needed, if there are you are woefully inadequate from a security standpoint. SOC2 is below the bare minimum for actual security, but it's the standard firms have settled on.
That said, actually getting a valid SOC2 audit completed is expensive and for a solo dev you can expect at least a month of lost time. I wouldn't pay out-of-pocket for an audit, but if you're in a space where customers are asking it can be a selling point. One strategy would be to negotiate reduced terms with a potential client to use their auditing firm and have them split costs on the audit. This would need to be a very hot sales lead, since it's a big ask, but it might be worth exploring. They likely already have an established relationship with an auditor, and having a referral will cut the price down.
SOC is just a box ticking exercise and doesn't improve security at all. Or at least it shouldn't, if you don't already meet their requirements you need to either shut down your side hustle or completely revamp your processes. That said, the box-ticking is extremely tedious and involves reams of paperwork. It would be doable as a solo entrepreneur, I worked through the process in a company of 6 employees, but it's not fun or productive.
> many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate
I work on audit compliance for a SOC2 compliant system, and as part of our own audit requirements it is non-negotiable that all of our vendors must themselves be SOC2 compliant.
I very much doubt anyone who has a SOC2 requirement is not in the same boat with respect to dependencies
I've been through SOC 2 Type 2 in a company with ~100 people. I think it'd be in some ways simpler as a solopreneur, but still a lot of effort. You won't require as complex controls and you don't need to communicate between different parts of company, but it'll just be yourself doing it all.
On a positive side, you won't have to do 100% of SOC 2 Type 2. The only required part is security if I remember correctly. And a lot of it is best practices that need to be in place anyway. If you are using an established cloud provider a lot of it is in place through their certifications. Some of the controls can be "silly", but generally not hard to put in place. I'd try to figure out what are the minimum nr of controls required and see if that is doable. Pretty sure auditors will give a discount there if the scope is smaller.
It can be somewhat useful for the company if taken seriously, as it can point out weaknesses in processes. Although I agree with other comments that most of it is a checkbox exercise than something that provides any real guarantees to the client demanding it.
I also don't know if getting through it with <20k $ is something that is feasible. Before doing SOC 2 we relied on the clients' security questionnaires instead, so maybe something to always ask about. Usually they were able to make an exception and allow it, although the % started shrinking over time.
Edit: Also, the auditor makes a difference. Pick one that understands small companies. A corporation auditor will get confused with "segregation of duties" if you are the only person in the company.
Most early-stage founders don’t start with full SOC2 immediately. You can begin with strong security practices, transparent documentation, privacy policy, backups, access controls, and third-party audits before going for certification.
What kind of documents should I show customers to make them trust me that I follow best security practices? They trust Soc2 Type2, what else could work?
If they don't have a strict requirement on SOC2, then either PCI compliance or NSA CISA are more easily done without needing tons of money.
Edit: PCI would only apply if you are processing customer funds Iirc, it's been a few years since I went through one but thereay be some caveats for that to apply.
Really appreciate this discussion as I'll be shortly going through this with a 1-2 person company. Does anyone have any experience on how it compares to ISO27001 from the 1-2 person company feasibility standpoint?
I'm in a similar position. The business continuity requirements are difficult to satisfy. And the amount of paperwork you need to do (depending on your policies of course) can be a major slow down for developing new stuff. So it's best to get your dev heavy stuff done before. I'm just filling in the questionnaires instead for now (and losing some customers who would be too big anyway)
I doubt it's possible. I'd avoid it as long as you can. It's been a continuous stream of audits for my the company I work for and resulted basically total loss of developer agency.
Building Email Assassin - helping founders fix email chaos. Published a free 5-step system: atlasoperator.ai/inbox-clear-one-hour (no product pitch, just tactics that work)
Mr. Maguire: "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word."
Benjamin: "Yes, sir."
Mr. Maguire: "Are you listening?"
Benjamin: "Yes, I am."
Mr. Maguire: "AI."
I went through the process and while it seems it's daunting, it's just a bunch of work and some cash. Once established it's also transformative (or should be) on your ongoing processes and practices. You codify those into a bunch of documents (jesus, that's a lot of documents type of thing) and provide evidence for each; Auditors latch onto those randomly. It's then your job to upkeep documents and evidence which can be helped with tools that have frameworks for those. We use drata and it's really simple and helpful to use.
I don't think you would be able to be compliant as a solo dude though, not easily. A bunch of protocols and practices revolve around governance, handovers, failovers, risk mitigation etc and if you're the only guy there's a hard path ahead. Are you reviewing and approving your own code that goes to production? If things go down and you're the first to call (let's say by automated alerting) and you're not available, who is the next one to call as in what's the documented succession plan or automated remediation.. etc.
Compensatory controls do not strictly require a human, they require mitigation of risk associated with a single human. You'd have to automate a lot of these governances "gates" then. So it would be possible, since evidence you would have to provide is work not org-chart, but it'd be a ton of work.
I went into it thinking I need to answer these 167 documents and provide evidence on an ongoing basis, but it actually also transformed the way we do things. I think for the better. At the end of the day, I also think this can be gamed as probably most certificates, but it's not worth it and transformation you go through makes sense.
My monolith C++ backend passed SOC2 Type 2 without any real efforts from me as a programmer since I was very security cautious when writing code. Nevertheless this whole business is a racket and unless you commit to spending small fortune you will be just fighting windmills no matter whether you are actually compliant. In my case I've developed it for a client so it was their headache. I've just written couple of documents outlining compliance features. but before we got certified we would give clients same documents and that would give us free ride for a while.
It's 100% a racket. Your code could have been 10x worse and still passed, I doubt the auditors even looked at the code. It's a legal box-checking exercise, there really isn't much of an actual review besides the documentation. But my god is there a lot of documentation and paperwork.
I’ll spend some more time replying to this next week, so circle back to this comment; I’m someone who regularly helps people get past these audits, meet the criteria customers are trying to assess with these certifications, and vet startups who don’t have these certifications or budget.
Start by pre-filling your own CAIQ v4 with an earnest “we don’t do this” or “we haven’t even thought about this” attempt: https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/artifacts/cloud-controls-m...
Then read through it and see what you can address immediately (EDR on your laptop, MFA on your cloud environments, etc), followed by role playing your client; “based on answers to this questionnaire, what would I not accept?”
There will be some items you can’t fix.
You’ll soon find out the majority of customers, including banks, governments, defence contractors, crypto startups — simply do not care. If they want to use your product, they’ll work with you.
It may be single-tenancy, it may require architectural changes, it may mean making it selfhosted with a time-bomb, but you’ll be able to address the requirements of the CISO, compliance monkey or executive.
I’ve yet to meet an industry or individual I can’t convince. Even if the product is a hot mess, half baked and radioactive — we’ll deploy it on a VM running inside of a VDI within the customer’s environment, because slopping together a migration path is _so easy_, and those early, highly regulated clients are worth it.
Major problem of entire compliance/auditing industry is not enough asking in companies "what are the actual risks we are dealing with", "what's the goal for given control", "do we have alternative control ensuring that".
Compounded by cheap shitty auditors that just mark down checkboxes on a worksheet
Thank you! That make a lot of sense!
No worries, it’s more about finding what the security and compliance teams care about — and making them comfortable. Compliance doesn’t equal security, I’ve onboarded startups with better security than the SOC2 certified, ISO27K Swiss cheese $B unicorn.
Hackers don’t target based on certification. It’s generally convenience and motive. Unknown startups who are laying solid foundations won’t show up on anyone’s radar for the first 2 years without some insanely unlucky event (i.e supply chain breach, an early employee doing something really dumb).
I'm currently at a small startup trying to do ISO 27001. A big issue we run into is that there simply aren't enough people. For example, the processes are built around having one person who writes code, and another person who reviews the written code. That's obviously impossible as a solo dev. You also need an internal auditor, who obviously needs to be separate from the operations team.
If I recall correctly the minimum in a standard setup is 9 roles which cannot overlap. You're going to have a very hard time doing that as a solo entrepreneur, so you'll probably need to find someone who is experienced in making unusual setups like these compliant - which isn't going to be cheap. Even after that there's a pretty decent chance you'll end up needing to hire 3rd-party services in order to be compliant: our "internal" auditor is just some big firm doing it for us.
We are a team of 1 developer and 1 sales/marketing and are fully certified. You can hire an external auditor for the internal audit. We have AI code reviews, so we don’t need an extra developer.
I offered self-hosting to bypass this. It did the trick and I was able to convert the enterprise customers where compliance was a red line.
I was part of several third party risk management audits from a corporate perspective.
We regularly audited and questioned SMBs (and big corps) with regards to their security posture. We knew that small shops wouldn’t be able to be fully compliant to SOC2 Type 2 or have an ISO27001 certified environment. If it was clear that our business wanted the product, we either tried to help the company with the questionnaire or created a risk report that was then signed by the business. In other words: even if your customer asks you to be compliant, you don’t have to be if they care enough about your product.
If you seem intent on getting things right, that’s a big plus. Most of your competitors don’t even know what SOC 2 is.
Can this also be done for HIPAA and FERPA, or for those compliance requirements is the process the way to go and just filling out the questionnaire would not be sufficient?
SOC2 is, at the end of the day, a voluntary compliance standard. HIPAA and FERPA requirements are federal law. Waiving those requirements would not just mean accepting additional liability, but would normally make your customer ineligible to receive federal funds, which are typically a substantial chunk of revenue.
Thank you for your comment!
Not possible in case your clients are not stupid. Any company with SOC2 and <5 people is a red flag.
You might find auditors that would go along but any reasonable client will check your SOC2 report and quality of your auditors.
SOC2 requires tons of paperwork and management and separation of duties with also mandatory roles in your company - never feasible in a one man show.
I've seen a small company do a SOC2 where the "CEO" seems to be the only actual employee..
Its a lot of paperwork but it is supposed to scale for company size so you could dismiss with a lot of the separation if the CEO accepts risks and perhaps relies on a fair amount of external systems that are already certified and has some contractors for specific tasks etc.
So that means that solo-entrepreneurs can't sell apps to big enterprises due to SOC2 limitation? I think that it is not fair
It’s a disadvantage for sure but not usually a blocker.
They often have security questionnaires you can complete instead. Or, as part of signing with them, you can promise to get SOC2 by x date (which will hopefully be easier with the funds from an enterprise contract).
I’d recommend looking online at some example security questionnaires or the types of things soc2 covers and writing an internal security doc for yourself so you know your position on everything and don’t have to scramble when it comes to it.
Thank you for your comment!
You can. It just means that the customer has to do the proper analyses and risk evaluation for their own SOC2 (or ISO 27001 or whatever) certification.
Just focus on providing a good value application and be frank about what you do, why you can't get certification for something like that, but that you can answer any questions they might have for their own certification process.
If the potential customer makes 'has SOC2' a requirement, than that is not a customer for you, in the same way that 'has more than 20 employees' rules you out.
Like it or not, having a bus factor of 1 is a pretty big risk. You are a giant single-point-of-failure, which means that operations-wise you are a far riskier option to your customers than a significantly larger competitor.
It isn’t fair, but few rackets are.
As others suggested, as a solo entrepreneur, I recommend not entering this process without a real justification. I passed this SOC 2 type for my startup after securing a deal with a big client. SOC 2 is an ongoing process that involves many documents and workflows you will need to implement in your company. If your clients really insist on proof of security compliance, I will try to find a local PT authority to complete a one-time process with them to obtain this kind of report.
PT?
penetration testing
Thank you!
Definitely possible. Start with SOC2-aligned practices and a solid public security page — many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate itself.
Do they? Every time I've been asked about SOC compliance, it turned out the underlying reason was either insurance or a requirement the customer had from their downstream customer. Neither of those cases would be negotiable, the customer's insurance company only cares about a checkbox that "All vendors are SOC2 compliant and relevant documentation is on file".
That said, actually being SOC compliant isn't that hard aside from the paperwork aspect. Any competent firm should already be doing all the things required, it's the bare minimum for security. There really shouldn't be any code or process changes needed, if there are you are woefully inadequate from a security standpoint. SOC2 is below the bare minimum for actual security, but it's the standard firms have settled on.
That said, actually getting a valid SOC2 audit completed is expensive and for a solo dev you can expect at least a month of lost time. I wouldn't pay out-of-pocket for an audit, but if you're in a space where customers are asking it can be a selling point. One strategy would be to negotiate reduced terms with a potential client to use their auditing firm and have them split costs on the audit. This would need to be a very hot sales lead, since it's a big ask, but it might be worth exploring. They likely already have an established relationship with an auditor, and having a referral will cut the price down.
SOC is just a box ticking exercise and doesn't improve security at all. Or at least it shouldn't, if you don't already meet their requirements you need to either shut down your side hustle or completely revamp your processes. That said, the box-ticking is extremely tedious and involves reams of paperwork. It would be doable as a solo entrepreneur, I worked through the process in a company of 6 employees, but it's not fun or productive.
> many early customers care more about transparency and good security hygiene than the certificate
I work on audit compliance for a SOC2 compliant system, and as part of our own audit requirements it is non-negotiable that all of our vendors must themselves be SOC2 compliant.
I very much doubt anyone who has a SOC2 requirement is not in the same boat with respect to dependencies
Thank you! Could you please share some great example of public security page so I can get some inspiration?
I was also interested in that and chatgpt came up with these:
https://iozen.ai/security/
https://logpulse.io/security/ SOC2 "in progress" haha
https://get.brightidea.com/security/
Thank you!
I've been through SOC 2 Type 2 in a company with ~100 people. I think it'd be in some ways simpler as a solopreneur, but still a lot of effort. You won't require as complex controls and you don't need to communicate between different parts of company, but it'll just be yourself doing it all.
On a positive side, you won't have to do 100% of SOC 2 Type 2. The only required part is security if I remember correctly. And a lot of it is best practices that need to be in place anyway. If you are using an established cloud provider a lot of it is in place through their certifications. Some of the controls can be "silly", but generally not hard to put in place. I'd try to figure out what are the minimum nr of controls required and see if that is doable. Pretty sure auditors will give a discount there if the scope is smaller.
It can be somewhat useful for the company if taken seriously, as it can point out weaknesses in processes. Although I agree with other comments that most of it is a checkbox exercise than something that provides any real guarantees to the client demanding it.
I also don't know if getting through it with <20k $ is something that is feasible. Before doing SOC 2 we relied on the clients' security questionnaires instead, so maybe something to always ask about. Usually they were able to make an exception and allow it, although the % started shrinking over time.
Edit: Also, the auditor makes a difference. Pick one that understands small companies. A corporation auditor will get confused with "segregation of duties" if you are the only person in the company.
Thank you for your comment!
Most early-stage founders don’t start with full SOC2 immediately. You can begin with strong security practices, transparent documentation, privacy policy, backups, access controls, and third-party audits before going for certification.
What kind of documents should I show customers to make them trust me that I follow best security practices? They trust Soc2 Type2, what else could work?
If they don't have a strict requirement on SOC2, then either PCI compliance or NSA CISA are more easily done without needing tons of money.
Edit: PCI would only apply if you are processing customer funds Iirc, it's been a few years since I went through one but thereay be some caveats for that to apply.
Really appreciate this discussion as I'll be shortly going through this with a 1-2 person company. Does anyone have any experience on how it compares to ISO27001 from the 1-2 person company feasibility standpoint?
I'm in a similar position. The business continuity requirements are difficult to satisfy. And the amount of paperwork you need to do (depending on your policies of course) can be a major slow down for developing new stuff. So it's best to get your dev heavy stuff done before. I'm just filling in the questionnaires instead for now (and losing some customers who would be too big anyway)
I doubt it's possible. I'd avoid it as long as you can. It's been a continuous stream of audits for my the company I work for and resulted basically total loss of developer agency.
Have the same feeeling....
A lot of early stage founders ran into this. Strong internal processes can already build a lot of trust before full SOC2 Type 2.
Building Email Assassin - helping founders fix email chaos. Published a free 5-step system: atlasoperator.ai/inbox-clear-one-hour (no product pitch, just tactics that work)
Mr. Maguire: "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word." Benjamin: "Yes, sir." Mr. Maguire: "Are you listening?" Benjamin: "Yes, I am." Mr. Maguire: "AI."
I went through the process and while it seems it's daunting, it's just a bunch of work and some cash. Once established it's also transformative (or should be) on your ongoing processes and practices. You codify those into a bunch of documents (jesus, that's a lot of documents type of thing) and provide evidence for each; Auditors latch onto those randomly. It's then your job to upkeep documents and evidence which can be helped with tools that have frameworks for those. We use drata and it's really simple and helpful to use.
I don't think you would be able to be compliant as a solo dude though, not easily. A bunch of protocols and practices revolve around governance, handovers, failovers, risk mitigation etc and if you're the only guy there's a hard path ahead. Are you reviewing and approving your own code that goes to production? If things go down and you're the first to call (let's say by automated alerting) and you're not available, who is the next one to call as in what's the documented succession plan or automated remediation.. etc.
Compensatory controls do not strictly require a human, they require mitigation of risk associated with a single human. You'd have to automate a lot of these governances "gates" then. So it would be possible, since evidence you would have to provide is work not org-chart, but it'd be a ton of work.
I went into it thinking I need to answer these 167 documents and provide evidence on an ongoing basis, but it actually also transformed the way we do things. I think for the better. At the end of the day, I also think this can be gamed as probably most certificates, but it's not worth it and transformation you go through makes sense.
Thank you for your feedback!
My monolith C++ backend passed SOC2 Type 2 without any real efforts from me as a programmer since I was very security cautious when writing code. Nevertheless this whole business is a racket and unless you commit to spending small fortune you will be just fighting windmills no matter whether you are actually compliant. In my case I've developed it for a client so it was their headache. I've just written couple of documents outlining compliance features. but before we got certified we would give clients same documents and that would give us free ride for a while.
It's 100% a racket. Your code could have been 10x worse and still passed, I doubt the auditors even looked at the code. It's a legal box-checking exercise, there really isn't much of an actual review besides the documentation. But my god is there a lot of documentation and paperwork.