Security basics every SaaS founder should demand from their dev team

Most early-stage security gaps aren't sophisticated attacks, they're basic hygiene that never got done because nobody with the authority to prioritize it asked about it. You don't need to review a line of code to close most of this gap. You need to know what to ask and expect a straight answer.

The non-negotiable list

• Passwords and secrets are never stored in plain text, in code, or committed to version control: ask directly whether any API keys have ever ended up in a public or shared repository
• Every user input is validated server-side, not just checked in the browser: client-side validation is a UX nicety, not a security control
• Access control is enforced on the backend for every request, not assumed because a button is hidden in the UI
• Data in transit is encrypted (HTTPS everywhere, no exceptions for internal tools) and sensitive data at rest is encrypted too
• Dependencies get updated on a real cadence, not only when someone remembers: outdated libraries are one of the most common real-world breach vectors

Questions worth asking in plain language

• "If someone gets my user ID, can they access another user's data by just changing a number in the URL?" This single question catches an alarming number of real vulnerabilities.
• "What happens to a customer's data if we get breached? Is it encrypted at rest, or would it be readable as-is?"
• "How do we find out if a dependency we use gets a security advisory?" There should be an actual process, not "we'd probably notice eventually."
• "Who besides engineers has production database access, and is that access logged?"

Compliance frameworks are a checklist, not a strategy

SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification matters for enterprise sales, but treating the framework itself as your security strategy gets the order backwards. Good security practice, done consistently, makes achieving a compliance framework mostly a documentation exercise. Chasing the framework first, without the underlying practice, produces a business that passes an audit and still gets breached.

The cheapest security investment most teams skip

An incident response plan costs nothing but a few hours of thinking through: who gets notified first, how do we communicate to affected customers, what's our rollback plan if a deployed change is the cause. Almost nobody has this written down before their first real incident, and that's exactly when the extra hour of confusion costs the most.