Are compliance and security reviews stalling your deals?
I’ve been digging into something that feels like a massive hidden tax on B2B SaaS companies, especially those selling to enterprises or regulated industries.
We all know the drill:
A deal is about to close.
Then procurement hits you with a 200 question security audit.
Or compliance suddenly becomes "table stakes" and your competitors have a badge you don’t.
It’s not just a sales problem. It’s an operational bottleneck. It slows down engineering, pulls founders out of product work, and kills momentum.
I’m currently exploring a different approach to how this layer of "trust infrastructure" gets built and managed.
Not another checkbox tool.
Something that lives inside the operational flow, not outside of it.
I don’t have a public product yet just a hypothesis I’m stress-testing.
If you’ve dealt with any of this lately, I’d love to ask you 2 quick questions:
What part of this process actually pisses you off the most?
If you could snap your fingers and fix one thing here what would it be?
No pitch. No link. Just trying to build something that actually helps.
The part that actually hurts: a 2-15 person team gets a 150-row spreadsheet and panics into borrowing SOC 2 language they can't back up. That's what turns a two-week review into a two-month one, because every vague answer generates three follow-ups from the reviewer's side.
What's worked for us: freeze the claims first (one doc of what is actually true today), answer only that, and for every gap write three things - the gap, the compensating control, and a date. Reviewers are used to being stonewalled; a plain "no SSO yet, SAML on the roadmap for Q3, today it's enforced 2FA and quarterly access review" almost never kills a deal.
The other cheap win is a short /security page that openly says you don't have SOC 2 yet, then lists encryption, access control, backups, subprocessors, and incident contact. It kills maybe half the spreadsheet before it's sent, and it unblocks deals far faster than waiting on an audit window.
So for your questions: what pisses me off most is re-answering the same 40 questions in someone else's format. The one thing I'd snap my fingers at is a canonical answer store that owners can keep current, so the questionnaire is assembly rather than authorship.