Five ways your team is putting your SaaS company at risk

Executive overview

Team members and contractors can expose your SaaS business in ways that kill a funding round or hand leverage to the wrong person. Most vulnerabilities come from skipping basic access hygiene, not from external attackers.

Every person who touches your business needs a signed agreement, and you must own every credential, server, and login they use.

No agreement with contractors or employees

• Anyone who touches code, data, or systems must sign a written agreement before access.
• Agreements must cover IP ownership and code rights — buyers in an exit will check every one.
• Without an agreement, a contributor can claim ownership of their portion of the codebase at any time.
• Dead equity — equity assigned informally via email — can block a funding round until resolved.
• Audit now: list everyone who has ever touched your code and confirm a signed agreement exists.

Using contractors' own servers

• Never let a contractor create or store work assets on their own infrastructure.
• Developers must work within your GitHub, designers within your Dropbox, writers within your Google Drive.
• If you need to offboard someone, all source files, raw assets, and edit history must already be in your accounts.
• A developer who owns the GitHub repo can hold the codebase hostage and demand payment to hand it over.

Not owning all logins

• Your team members may create personal logins to company systems and never share the credentials.
• You will only discover this when you try to transition someone off — by which point it may be too late.
• Use a password manager (e.g. 1Password, LastPass) and require all logins to be stored there.
• When onboarding a contractor, schedule a 30-minute session: set up the account, test the password, reset it so you hold the admin credential, then grant them access through the shared tool.

Giving third-party apps access via corporate logins

• Team members routinely sign up for new tools using their corporate Google or Microsoft account without realising they are granting that tool access to internal data.
• These tools can pull your entire contacts database, read email, and crawl internal systems — often with the employee's unwitting consent.
• Enforce two-factor authentication (2FA) across all systems: it makes it far harder for unauthorised third-party apps to maintain persistent access.
• Train your team explicitly: never log into an external startup tool using a corporate login.

Weak passwords and no two-factor authentication

• A compromised phone or weak password grants access to email, which cascades to every system that uses "forgot password".
• Attackers can reset voicemail, DNS records, domain registrars, and banking from a single email account takeover.
• Require strong, unique passwords for every system — a password manager will flag credentials already seen in known breaches.
• 2FA is non-negotiable; password managers can store TOTP tokens so team members aren't blocked by SMS codes going to one person's phone.