Product Habits - I had this nagging feeling

After building software for 16 years, I’ve learned to listen to my gut when it comes to selling SaaS products.

Early on during our pivot to Nira, I had this nagging feeling.

In order to sell SaaS products in today’s environment, we would need to address any and all security concerns that our potential customers had. I believed that by embedding a security mindset into our business as early as possible, it would help potential customers buy and adopt our product faster.

It was during a leadership team meeting with my co-founder and our CTO - and I knew Marie and Steve weren’t expecting this from me - but I blurted out “We need to get our SOC 2 asap.”

We were already stretched thin, trying to build our real-time document access control product as fast as possible to meet customer demand. Marie and Steve naturally looked at me as if I was crazy. How were we going to carve out time and resources to do this too?

It’s more necessary than ever to make sure that your customer feels extremely comfortable about your security and compliance practices.

I knew in my bones that this was true, but I had to take the team on the journey with me.

Bottom-up SaaS adoption has caused IT to require companies to prove that their security practices are adequate to protect customer data. Tools used to spread easily throughout the org if users wanted them. Tons of unicorns have been built on that land and expand model.

But a shift has happened. IT now has more power to dictate the tools that people use.

Every SaaS product, if it’s going to scale to a single department or up to a whole company, or if they are going to store company data, needs to make the IT and security departments at their customer’s companies happy. Or else they won’t buy the tool.

Every company that sells to other companies has to take security and compliance extremely seriously at this point. Cybersecurity is no longer an afterthought or a nice-to-have. Security is becoming every single person’s responsibility in the company to help. Even the smallest customers care now.

I was able to get Marie and Steve on board with getting our SOC 2 Type 2 as early as possible. And now, the three of us are super aligned on the absolute importance of security and compliance.

It’s not just about being enterprise ready. It’s about being security-minded as a company and making sure it’s woven into the fabric of the company’s DNA.

If you’re considering getting any compliance certifications, like SOC 2, ISO, or HIPAA, here are a few triggers that should help you know when it’s the right time:

Your customer cares about security and compliance. It could be because of their size, the buyer you’re selling to (i.e. IT, legal, security), the industry the company is in, or their customers’ requirements.
You are confident that you’ll be selling to customers that need these certifications in the near future.
You’re already being turned down by potential customers because you don’t have your SOC 2 (or another certification).
You are building a company in the security or compliance space.
Your company started and grew before SOC 2 existed and you’re now playing catch-up to make sure customers don’t churn.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be diving deep into how we’ve developed a security mindset at Nira by getting our SOC 2 Type 2 certification and more.

Hit reply if you’ve got questions or comments about security and compliance, I’ll make sure your questions get answered.

Take care,

Hiten

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Product Habits - I had this nagging feeling

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