Ask HN: How to be SOC2 Type 2 compliant as a solo-entreprenuer?

Don't. You are exactly the wrong kind of firm to be pursuing SOC2.

SOC2 is like the corporate GPL of security. It's an infectious secret handshake company security teams swap in lieu of filling out security questionnaires. Nobody savvy takes it seriously.

There will come a time where your business will grow to the point where it makes sense to pay for the secret handshake. The overwhelming most likely scenario in which that happens is a purchase order made contingent on your SOC2 Type I attestation, where the revenue from that purchase order more than pays for the attestation.

Do not ever do a SOC2 speculatively, in the hopes that it will improve your sales prospects. Plenty of successful firms don't have SOC2s. If you're losing sales where SOC2 is a factor, you didn't have those sales to begin with.

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.

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.

I am a solo entrepreneur. Don't.

I learned that my business is unable to pass pretty much ANY certification or corporate IT security audit. Many of the questions simply do not apply to my business ("do you have documented procedures for revoking employee access") and the default answer is NO. Get even a single NO and you're done.

I gave up and these days actively discourage enterprises from even trying to sign up — these kinds of discussions can take a lot of your time and the expected value is negative, because sooner or later those kinds of questionnaires will be required (quite often the engineer talking to you doesn't even know this).

SOC2 falls into that category: you are unlikely to pass, and even if you do, enterprise customers will pull out their own questionnaires out of, well, let's just call it their store backrooms, and you will fail those. Waste of time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Avoid it for as long as you can. I worked at a startup that sold to enterprises. We had 6 employees. The CEO / sales was able to work around the SOC2 requirement every time.

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.

Has no one yet found a way to vibe-code this into a viable self-service solution?

and yes I do understand there is a IRL-auditing authority piece to all of this too.

Perhaps there this is a play here in the market to create a new auditing firm that 99% automates all this for startups?

sans fraud certs of course.

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?

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.

You could look at the process itself and apply the things that sound good to you. It won't help with official certificates but you can start replying back saying you adhere to certain things that are suggested by SOC 2 Type 2.

I can also say that being SOC 2 Type 2 compliant doesn't come even remotely close to demonstrating that you can be trusted. That's not a knock on you or your work ethic, but there's tons of ways for things to go wrong or get leaked while still being SOC 2 Type 2 certificated.

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.

It's easier than you might think. Not easy! But I've done it. Have Fortune <100 customers.

As others point out if you don't show your audit you have to affirm that you basically do everything an audit would check. So, do it.

I found Thoropass to be offer a deal that was affordable. You're not too small for them. Check them out.

You can form your processes any way you want! Use AI to construct your policies. Just document what you do.

I spent a probably 5 hours a month the first year. Learning curve and I felt I needed the hand holding from Thoropass... they were generous with time and explanations. Subsequent years, it's all set up, very little until audit time.

I’m normally a “to each his own” guy but have to say I strongly disagree with a lot of these comments.

First of all, you absolutely can do it as a solo entrepreneur - I just completed SOC 2 for the second time - this one being solo. Yes you have to be creative with how you setup checks and balances but it’s not impossible.

Also, SOC 2 Type 2 is an auditor verifying that you’re actually carrying out the processes that you claimed to do in Type 1. So how do you start? You start with Type 1.

I doubt you could get it under $20k but that’s the ballpark. Personally I’d recommend Vanta which will hold your hand through at least half the process. And Vanta support will recommend auditors who typically cut their rate in half because Vanta does so much of the work.

Is it worth it? No way I could answer that for you. Personally I’d say half of SOC 2 is kinda bull crap and half of it is really good healthy processes. It’s definitely a commitment to get through the first audit, but after that it’s more like a 1-2 weeks of work every year.

Any decent auditor will understand you’re new to the process and will coach you through it. Their goal is for you to have a good audit, so they will literally tell you what needs to be done ahead of time.

I feel weird evangelizing it like this cause I’m not like a big fan, but we absolutely have clients that wouldn’t be customers if we didn’t have SOC 2. Yeah, it can be a warm and fuzzy for it groups, but that’s sales, right? My experience is once you have SOC 2 type 2, the IT approval process is far more streamlined.

Not saying you should or shouldn’t, but don’t dismiss it.

Yes, its very possible.

What's most important for you would just being able to prove to your customers that you do what you say you do.

The core issue isn't SOC 2, it's verifiability. Your customers want to know that what you claim about your security posture is actually true, not just documented.

I've actually been deeply exploring the compliance space lately and a few days ago I built an open-core pre-audit readiness layer. Every finding traces back to the raw AWS API call that produced it, SHA-256 hashed. An auditor or skeptical customer can verify it themselves without taking your word for it.

Its more SOC 2-esque, & its pre-audit readiness not a certification, but it does the job of proving you are trustworthy.

repo if relevant: https://github.com/adog0822/AWS-Evidence-Layer

(I built this, disclosing upfront)

Soc-2 Type 2 is a lot of work for solo-ent. and you might have issues meeting some of the compliance with only one employee there won't be checks and balances. We worked with a local firm and their fee was around $15k but there is ongoing verification. Also there is a process you have to follow moving forward that's probably the largest cost.

I'm not sure SOC-2 is even valuable for most smaller apps. As it's compliance is more aligned for financial apps.

It might be more valuable for you to have a security audit instead of SOC-2.

Instead of trying to get the actual SOC 2 attestation, do a version of the homework that would get you there; basically writing documentation. The output would be documents describing different procedures or existing infra (disaster recovery, network diagrams etc) and a master spreadsheet with the "soc 2" questions (that you pick) and answers, a "security questionnaire" and this is what you send to companies when they insist.

Note in security-speak the keyword is "mitigation" (you don't have x but you mitigate that by y)

Yes, this is a long journey, but can be done definately, for my first startup reetro. I have done ISO27001 myself and now doing SOC-2 for my second startup Sekorti, which is actually a security and compliance tool and helps with alot of SOC-2 requirements. You need to understand the full scope of SOC-2 requirements, implement those controls and document/collect evidences. It is definately doable, if you approach it in a structured manner.

There are plenty of companies and apps that can help you achieve SOC2 or ISO certification by showing your compliance score and telling what needs to be done. They provide templates and assist with setting up processes and policies that will get you to SOC2. This typically takes 4–6 months. I would suggest to go for ISO 42k1 instead of SOC2.

Don’t. I work on a highly regulated project and it’s the full time job of several people. Only do it if you can hire a team of, like, 4 people AND make a profit

I'm a solo entrepreneur running a b2b saas product I built. I do not have a soc2 certificate (or any certificate). I have never lost any sales (that I know of) because of it.

I've sold to customers that pay $2XX,XXX annually and it was never an issue. I wouldn't worry about it, but be prepared to answer security questionnaires.

Ugh, it's hard. You can outsource as much as possible and minimize your surface area, those are the two approaches I have used, but the auditor expense is the biggest blocker. A few years back you could find auditors for $5-6k, but I think the security/audit service providers have eaten a lot of that market.

You don’t it’s a waste of time and money.

I had the same issues, you do not need full SOC-2 but need to present your security posture in a professional manner. try sekorti dot com,

Wow. Thank you for this thread. As a solo entrepreneur this worries me, since I am putting out agent governance products out there.

You don't. Customers who need it don't buy from solopreneurs. And if they did, they wouldn't expect it.

A lot of early stage founders ran into this. Strong internal processes can already build a lot of trust before full SOC2 Type 2.

There are ways to do it. Send me a message, and I can make an intro to the person we use.

Also offering MFA and ideally SSO really helps them feel more secure.

Agree with tptacek for the speculative case — chasing SOC 2 without a deal on the table is expensive theater.

That said, there's a real inflection point where it flips. We've run SOC 2 for companies where the trust-establishment effort alone was costing 2-3 sales cycles per quarter. At that point the audit pays for itself fast. also, we can get that audit down substantially below 20k...

The signal to watch: if you're losing deals to a competitor who has it, or spending more time on security reviews than closing, that's your major signal.

Also, if your sales cycle becomes "days" or weeks instead of months, thats another major signal. A third-party certification is a stamp of approval that cuts through red tape and BS.

I'm a vCISO and founder at MARFI Systems, currently finishing a doctorate in cybersecurity at GWU and have helped numerous companies from 1-man startups to 500+ unicorns. Happy to jump on a call and help provide some clarify around security and compliance.

fire the client.

either they will use the app without soc2 or they will find an alternative.

delve. s

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."