A ten-person team facing its first SOC 2 or ISO 27001 cannot run compliance the way a hundred-person company does, and should not try. The leverage at small scale is in habits that are cheap to keep and expensive to retrofit. A few of them, started early, carry most of the weight.
Pick the frameworks, then forget the binder
Decide which frameworks actually apply to you (a B2B SaaS selling into the EU is usually looking at SOC 2 or ISO 27001 plus GDPR, sometimes DORA or NIS 2 depending on the customer) and write that down once. Then resist the urge to live in a giant controls spreadsheet. At your size, the spreadsheet rots faster than the system changes.
What you want instead is for the handful of code-facing controls to be checked where you already work: the pull request.
The habits that compound
Three habits do most of the work. Log security-relevant events (auth, privilege changes, access to sensitive data) from day one, because retrofitting an audit trail is painful. Keep access least-privilege by default, because walking back over-broad grants later is worse. And never log secrets or personal data, because cleaning a log store after the fact is the worst version of this work.
None of these need a GRC tool. They need to be noticed at code review, which is exactly where a small team already has eyes on every change.
Where automation helps a small team most
The thing a small team lacks is not diligence, it is the framework knowledge to recognize that a particular diff touches a particular control. That is the gap heygrc is built to close: to read the change against your selected frameworks and name the control, so a small team gets the framework awareness of a much larger one without hiring for it. heygrc is in early access.