From idea to Certified Microsoft app. I will not promote

Hero, So this will be a bit of a long one and a bit different from rest of the posts in here. But I wanted to share some experience. History : I built and app that was previously made for in-house use only. AI assistant integrated in Google Chat. It was built when the GPT4 came out, no codex, no claude code so kind of dark ages of AI coding. Idea solid, but I left that company because of mass lay-offs and BS talks from shareholders - "You (the department) are the core of the company and most important one here" while laying off my colleagues . So I just packed bags and took the project with me. I didn't know actually how to monetize the idea, since making in-house vs selling to others are completely different things. So after some time decided to make SaaS. (It was not so crowded yet at that time ). Getting first version done : Since SaaS was the idea, I had to implement the project into google chat. Easy-peasy for someone who's done it, but god damn it was annoying to set everything up. (This was the easiest step in the whole project when I look back at it. Security - Had to make it BYOK, connectors with knowledge platforms (confluence, sharepoint etc etc.). taking in mind everything had to really understand how to make the platform secure so Vault, only 0auth , celery workers, etc etc etc. took me 3 months only to set up somewhat secure platform. Second version : Decided to get into MS teams since Microslop has the biggest marketshare compared to google chat, slack , discord and others. And boiiiii that was a shit show ready to go down. The bugs in Azure, their partner ship platform etc. Long story short I had to make 2 accounts just to be able to start process to get published in MS marketplace. why? the fuck knows really. Getting into MS marketplace? Imagine spending a month just because the MS representitive that checks if the app works can't follow guideline "IF YOU COPY BYOK KEY FROM PDF MAKE SURE DELETE SPACES THE PDF CREATES." (I had to provide testing credentials) 4 times I got rejected with a message "App doesn't work" . Checked Vault - yep, they can't even follow simple guideline which was told to them 4 times. After all of this it was already 8 months done from leaving company to getting into Google chat and MS teams. at this moment the SaaS market started to really explode and had to improve things, so instead of just QA bot trained on internal knowledge made it into sort of AI agent, from chat it can send out any info to other platforms... Easy since the platform already had 90% of skeleton done for this. MS 365 Cert : This one nearly broke me, it's the big daddy MS cert, 56 compliance controls starting from GDPR to documents that my company has completed yearly coding safe practices. Soooo many documents. made like 600-900 pages of PDFs, 100-150 screenshots etc. Had to even get other certificates to get the controls done. Soul crushing job for a single dev and I know why the certified apps was almost empty. The penetration test : Oh boy, you can call them aliens because they probe everything. And best of all it was free at that time ( no longer available) 1 pen test, and 1 re-pen test . If you fail, either let it go or spend like $4k for another try (or more) that's just for a funny light pressure. Funniest part was when they asked to install 96gb program on my server (it's their probing app) and server was only 80 or so at that time. [Insert the hamster eating a hotdog meme] . I can't really say much what they checked, I guess it was under the NDA but it was rough and it took me the 2nd try to pass it... thank god still free. What changed after app gets MS 365 Cert : Jack shit. If you think that becoming 1/2000 to 1/10 apps in marketplace, there are no major increase in sign ups. So Marketplace is not for new client acquisition it's for proving that your app is somewhat safe. (well safer that 99.9999% apps made in the past year for sure). But personally, I'm really proud to have a badge that only some if not no other solo builder has acquired. Being the only app in Baltic region with such app and most of all the shit I went through doing this solo I'm proud that I didn't crush and cry when eyes already started watering going through all the shit I had to. Long story short : Get these big certificates only if clients ask for security approval. Do it for yourself you will learn how many mistakes you make vibe coding. Do not think that when you get into marketplace, get certificate it will get you new clients from it. Most likely it will not. Sorry for a long, non AI generated text.