How to Get SOC 2 as a Startup: Step-by-Step Guide (2026)

A customer just asked for your SOC 2 report. You do not have one. Now what?

This guide walks through the entire process from zero to audit report. It is written for startup founders and engineering leads going through SOC 2  for the first time, not compliance professionals who already know the framework. We l explain what each step actually involves, how long it typically takes, what it costs, and where most startups get stuck.

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A quick clarification on terminology: SOC 2 is technically an attestation, not a certification. No certificate is issued. Instead, you receive an audit report from a licensed CPA firm stating that your controls meet the SOC 2 criteria. But everyone calls it "getting SOC 2 certified," so we will use both terms interchangeably throughout this guide.

Before You Start: Do You Actually Need SOC 2 Right Now?

Not every startup needs SOC 2 immediately. Here is a simple  filter:

• A customer, prospect, or investor has explicitly asked for it → Yes, start now.
• You are selling to US mid-market or enterprise B2B buyers → You will need it within 6-12 months.
• You are pre-revenue, still iterating on your product, and selling to small businesses → Probably not yet. Your environment and controls will likely change as your product evolves, and you may waste the investment. 

If you are in the first two categories, keep reading.

Step 1: Decide Your Scope

This is the most important decision in the entire process. Scope determines almost everything: how many controls you need, how much evidence you collect, how long it takes, and what it costs.

What you are deciding:

• Which Trust Services Criteria to include. Security is mandatory. Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy are optional. Most startups start with Security only, or Security + Availability if uptime matters to their customers.
• Which systems are in scope. Systems that support the service being audited or store, process, or transmit customer data typically need to be included. This means your cloud infrastructure, your codebase and deployment pipeline, your identity provider, your communication tools (if they contain customer discussions), and your HR/onboarding systems.
• Which people are in scope. Everyone who has access to in-scope systems. For most startups, that is the entire team.

Common scoping mistakes:

• Scoping too broadly. You do not need to include every tool your company uses. A marketing automation platform that never touches customer data can stay out of scope.
• Scoping too narrowly. If your auditor discovers a critical system was excluded, you may need to restart parts of the process.
• Forgetting third-party vendors. If you use a cloud provider, a payment processor, or a data sub-processor, they become part of your scope from a vendor risk and dependency perspective. .

Practical advice: Keep scope tight for your first audit. Start with the Security criteria only and limit the scope to a single product or environment where possible.  You can expand in year 2. A focused scope means fewer controls, less evidence, and a faster path to the report.

Step 2: Choose Type I or Type II

• Type I evaluates whether your controls are properly designed and implemented at a single point in time. Faster, cheaper, and sufficient for many early-stage sales conversations.
• Type II evaluates whether your controls are properly designed, implemented, and operated effectively over a period of time (typically 3 months for your first report and then 12 months thereafter). This is what most enterprise buyers ultimately want.

Our recommendation for startups: Start with Type I. It is faster (no observation period), cheaper, and gives you a report you can share with prospects immediately. Then upgrade to Type II once you have been operating the controls consistently. Many startups use Type I to unblock a specific deal and pursue Type II in parallel.

Some enterprise buyers will accept a Type I report if you can show you are actively pursuing Type II. Others will require Type II. Ask your customer what they need before assuming.

Step 3: Gap Analysis

Before building anything, assess where you stand today. A gap analysis compares your current environment against SOC 2 requirements and produces a prioritized list of what needs to change.

What you are looking at:

• Do you have documented security policies? (Most startups do not.)
• Don’t forget to consider organization controls. This includes but is not limited to things like a documented code of conduct, sanctions policy, acceptable use, employee handbook, employment contracts, performance evaluations, job descriptions, clear lines of authority (organization chart), background screening. These need to be addressed even in a single member (Founder only) organization. 
• Do you require security awareness training for all personnel? What about contractors?
• Is access control formalized? (MFA enforced, role-based access, offboarding process.)
• Do you have logging and monitoring? (Not just enabled, but reviewed.)
• Is there an incident response process? (Even a simple one.)
• Are vendor relationships documented? (Who has access to what, and is their security posture assessed.)
• Are employee devices managed? (Encryption, screen locks, antivirus.)
• Have you performed a enterprise risk assessment. (SOC 2 controls are based on risks and the standard requires a formal risk assessment).  

Output: A list of gaps ranked by effort and importance. This becomes your implementation plan.

How long this takes: 1-2 weeks for a small startup. Longer if nobody knows how things are currently configured.

Step 4: Implement Controls

This is where most of the work lives. You are taking the gap list from Step 3 and closing every item.

‍Typical work includes:

• Writing policies (information security, code of conduct, employee handbook, acceptable use, asset management, access control, incident response, change management, vendor management, data retention, data classification, bring your own device (BYOD), business continuity & disaster recovery, risk management, cryptography, physical security, system hardening, password, network security, endpoint security, backup, vulnerability management, and system development). These should be tailored to reflect how your company actually operates based on your tech stack, not be copied from a template.
• Configuring access controls (enforcing MFA everywhere, setting up role-based access, documenting who has access to what and why).
• Setting up monitoring and logging (centralizing logs, enabling alerts for suspicious activity, reviewing them regularly).
• Implementing change management (documenting code review requirements, deployment processes, approval workflows).
• Formalizing HR processes (background checks for new hires, security awareness training, documented onboarding and offboarding checklists).
• Performing a risk assessment (identifying threats to your business, evaluating likelihood and impact, documenting how you mitigate each one).
• Conducting vendor reviews (assessing the security posture of your critical vendors, documenting the review).
• Getting a penetration test (hiring a firm to test your application and infrastructure for vulnerabilities).

How long this takes: 12 weeks for a well-organized small team. Longer if you are starting from scratch on multiple fronts, or if the work competes with product development.

What slows teams down: Not the complexity of individual tasks, but the coordination. Policies need internal alignment. Access reviews require input from everyone. Vendor reviews depend on third parties responding. None of it is hard, but all of it takes time. Documentation is the key to any audit. If it's not documented, it never happened.

Step 5: Choose Your Auditor

Your auditor is the licensed CPA firm that will examine your controls and issue the SOC 2 report. Choose them before you finish implementation so they can confirm your scope and approach.

What to look for:

• Experience with startups. A firm that audits 500-person enterprises will expect more formality than you can reasonably provide. Find one that works with companies your size.
• Familiarity with your compliance platform (if you use one). Auditors who know the platform's evidence format move faster.
• Reasonable pricing. Type I audits for startups range from $3,500 to $15,000. If you are quoted $40,000+, you are talking to the wrong firm.
• Communication style. You will work closely with them for several weeks. Pick someone responsive and clear.

When to engage them: Ideally, engage the auditor 4 to 6 weeks before the SOC 2 Type 1 point-in-time date or the start of the Type 2 audit period. This gives the auditor time to schedule the engagement and gives your organization time to address any issues identified during the planning and readiness phase. 

Step 6: Collect Evidence

Before the auditor arrives, you need to have evidence that your controls are working. Evidence is proof that you did what your policies say you do.

Examples of evidence:

• Screenshots of system configurations like MFA enforcement settings.
• Documents that record control performance like access reviews were performed quarterly.
• Records of completed security training for all employees.
• Change management logs (pull requests with approvals for system development, and tickets detailing infrastructure, configuration, and other system changes).
• Incident response documentation: Even if no significant incidents occurred, maintain evidence that incident response procedures are in place and operating. Auditors may review both major incidents requiring formal escalation and routine security events such as phishing attempts, malware alerts, or failed login investigations that were identified and resolved.
• Penetration test report.
• Vendor security assessment records.

The key principle: If it is not documented, it did not happen. An auditor cannot give you credit for a control they cannot see evidence of.

Using a platform: Compliance platforms like Klaay, Vanta, Drata, or Sprinto can automate evidence collection by connecting to your systems and continuously capturing technical configurations and settings. However, automation alone does not prove that management performed required activities such as reviewing alerts, investigating exceptions, or following up on issues. Manual evidence of those activities is still required.

Step 7: The Attestation (Audit)

The auditor examines your controls, reviews evidence, tests samples, and asks questions. This is not a pass/fail exam. It is an examination that results in a report describing your controls and whether they meet the criteria.

What happens:

• The auditor reviews your system description (a narrative of what your service does, how it works, and what controls are in place).
• They select samples of evidence to test.
• They ask follow-up questions where evidence is unclear or incomplete.
• For Type II, they test whether controls operated consistently over the observation period.

How long fieldwork takes: 2-4 weeks for a small startup. Much of this is asynchronous (you provide evidence, they review it, they send questions, you answer).

What can go wrong: Missing evidence is the most common issue. The auditor asks for proof of something, and you cannot produce it. This delays the process and can result in exceptions in your report.

Step 8: Report and Maintenance

After fieldwork, the auditor drafts a report. You review it for factual accuracy. They finalize and issue it.

What you get: A formal SOC 2 report (typically 50-100+ pages) that you can share with customers and prospects under NDA. It describes your system, your controls, the tests performed, and the results.

After the report:

• Share it with customers who asked for it. Most companies create an NDA-gated request process.
• Set up a branded trust page where prospects can see your compliance status.
• Continue operating your controls. SOC 2 is not a one-time project. You will audit again next year (Type II), and evidence needs to keep flowing.
• Budget for ongoing maintenance: this includes annual audits, annual pen test, platform subscription, periodic policy reviews, and consulting or compliance support services if internal resources are not available to manage ongoing requirements. 

Timeline Summary

For a typical small SaaS startup (5-30 people) pursuing SOC 2 Type I:

• Scope and planning: 1-2 weeks
• Gap analysis: 1-2 weeks
• Implementation: 2-8 weeks
• Evidence collection: ongoing during implementation
• Auditor engagement: start 4-6 weeks before target audit date
• Audit fieldwork: 2-4 weeks
• Report: 1-2 weeks after fieldwork

Total: 8-16 weeks from start to report for Type I.

For Type II, add a 3-6 month observation period between implementation and audit fieldwork.

Common Mistakes

• Starting too late. SOC 2 takes months. If a deal requires it in 3 weeks, you are already behind. Start before the deadline arrives.
• Copying template policies without reading them. Auditors will ask you questions about your policies. If they do not reflect how your company actually works, you will fail those questions.
• No clear owner. Someone needs to drive this. If it is "everyone's job," it is no one's job. Assign one person (founder, CTO, or ops lead) as the compliance owner.
• Over-engineering. You do not need enterprise-grade tooling for a 10-person company. Simple, consistent processes beat complex systems that no one follows.
• Ignoring vendor risk. Your vendors are in scope. If a critical vendor has no SOC 2 report and no security documentation, that is a gap in your program.
• Treating it as a one-time project. SOC 2 is an ongoing commitment. Build processes you can actually maintain, not ones you will abandon after the audit.

How Klaay Helps

We built Klaay for startups going through this process for the first time. The AI handles the parts that typically require a consultant or deep compliance knowledge:

• Generates your policies based on your actual tech stack and workflows.
• Connects to 100+ tools and collects evidence automatically.
• Maps controls to requirements and flags gaps.
• Walks you through each step so you know what to do next.
• Drafts security questionnaire responses from your compliance data.

Pricing starts at $149/month. No sales call required. Start a free trial at klaay.com.

For a full comparison of SOC 2 platforms and pricing, see our Best SOC 2 Tools for Startups in 2026. For a detailed cost breakdown, see SOC 2 Compliance Cost in 2026.

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