Security is one of those topics that tends to get treated as somebody else's problem — either too big for a small business to think about seriously, or something that can wait until the product is more established. We've seen both framings cause real problems.
The businesses most likely to be targeted aren't necessarily the biggest ones. They're the ones with valuable data and less mature security practices. A growing company with customer records, financial data, or proprietary processes is an attractive target. The size of the company doesn't change the value of what it holds.
Most of the security decisions that matter happen early in a project, which is why we try to have the conversation then rather than later. How is authentication handled? Where is sensitive data stored and who has access to it? How are API keys and credentials managed? What happens if a user's account is compromised? These aren't exotic questions. They're decisions that come up in every project, and the difference between handling them well and handling them poorly is usually not significant in terms of build time.
What does add time — and cost — is retrofitting security into a system that wasn't designed with it in mind. Changing how authentication works in a live system, migrating data to a more secure storage model, unpicking credential management that was wired in as an afterthought: these are all harder after the fact than at the design stage.
We don't claim to be security specialists, and for clients with specific compliance requirements we'll bring in people who are. But the baseline — sensible authentication, proper data handling, avoiding the obvious vulnerabilities — is something we treat as part of building something properly, not an optional extra. The conversation is worth having early, before the decisions that make it harder get made.