Avoid it for as long as you can. I worked at a startup that sold to enterprises. We had 6 employees. The CEO / sales was able to work around the SOC2 requirement every time.
I had no choice - we had so many security assessments spreadsheets sent by potential customers, that getting SOC2 saved us time in the long run.
The problem is, Vanta will ask (suggest? come perilously close to demand?) you do a lot of engineering work that is absolutely not necessary for a SOC2 attestation. Worse still: whatever controls you attest in your SOC2, you're practically locked into. If Vanta has you set up some cloud detection capability, and it turns out as you mature your security organization that it wasn't necessary or even useful, you have a fight on your hands with your Type II auditor about why you stopped doing it.
> that implies that they don't understand SOC2
Good engineering and SOC2 compliance can be on similar but not identical paths. If you want SOC2, you're bending your engineering towards that particular standard. Getting SOC2 compliant because it's time, and you have the customers, is just a step, and not a reflection of whatever good engineering you've done. If you can defend it, you can probably keep some of your variances.
If you're a solopreneur and you've never been in/near an audit, and you're committed to a vendor like Vanta, I'd recommend hiring a consultant for even a few hours to give you independent coverage of industry norms and a little coaching on sticking points.
Also, SOC2 audits are sometimes coupled with more strenuous ones, so in the umbrella of audit season, you may have to demonstrate things, or records of things.
Example: "I need access to EC2" isn't enough. I wind up with a role where I can launch instances, but not list them. I have to send several emails, have meetings, follow ups, sending links to AWS docs, etc. to get them to modify a custom IAM role. Then they still can't figure it out, so I am literally telling someone what to copy-and-paste into JSON to fix the issue. I completely understand more control in higher environments, but this crap adds up and costs weeks in lost productivity.