You did the demo. The champion loved it. Then procurement forwarded a 40-question vendor security questionnaire, your answers sat in a doc for two weeks, and the deal quietly expired. Sound familiar?
The trick is that most questionnaires reuse the same ten core questions. Answer them ONCE, properly, and you can respond to any questionnaire in under an hour. Here is the sheet:
1. Where is customer data stored? Name the region, the provider, and whether backups stay in the same region. Vague answers here kill deals faster than any vulnerability.
2. Who can access customer data? Roles, not names. "Two admins, access logged, least-privilege by default" is a pass. "The founders" is a fail.
3. How are backups handled, and can you prove a restore? Most vendors say "daily backups." Winners say "restore-tested weekly, evidence on file." The first-30-minutes incident one-pager that starts this discipline is free here - and once you restore-test, you can honestly answer "restore-tested."
4. What happens on breach? One paragraph: detection, containment, customer notification window, post-mortem. If you do not have this written, write it before the questionnaire, not after the incident.
5. Do you use sub-processors? List them. Hiding them is worse than having them.
6. How do we get our data out? Export format, deadline, and what happens to it after. Lock-in fears kill more deals than price.
7. What logging/audit trail exists? Even a simple immutable action log passes. Nothing passes.
8. Password/MFA policy? MFA mandatory for admin access, period.
9. Incident response history? "None material" is fine. Silence is not.
10. Who is accountable? One named role (a person or "the founder, formally designated"). Committees signal nobody owns it.
Notice what is happening: none of these answers requires enterprise infrastructure. They require WRITING THINGS DOWN. That is the entire gap between solo vendors who pass procurement and solo vendors who stall for months.
We packaged the written layer - the answers, the breach comms templates, the restore drill evidence, the access-review checklist - into the Ops Starter Kit. One-time download, no subscription:
https://hive80lab.gumroad.com/l/ops-starter-kit
Full lineup (starter kit, audit offers, runbooks): https://hive80lab.gumroad.com
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