TradeHygiene Checkup
A lightweight quarterly self-audit app for small tech and design studios that walks a founder through 20 yes/no questions about who has access to what, generates a risk report, and emails a checklist of access revocations for every departing employee.
Founders and operations leads at small tech or hardware studios (10-100 people) without a dedicated legal team
- Plain-English questionnaire that maps your current access controls (code, designs, vendor lists, prototypes) into a risk grade
- Automated 'departure day' checklist: revoke SSO, collect devices, rotate vendor logins, archive chats
- Quarterly reminder that runs the audit again and tracks improvement over time
- Template NDA and exit-letter language reviewed for trade-secret protection
Apple's allegations of employees screenshotting files hours before interviews and carrying out proprietary metal-finishing work at outside suppliers are exactly the kind of low-cost mistakes a small studio makes by default; a checkup tool has obvious timing.
Apple vs OpenAI trade-secret suit is generating heavy coverage (Fortune, CNBC, CNET, USNews), but small studios historically only act on IP hygiene after an incident, so demand is real but episodic and reactive rather than recurring.Employee Offboarding Checklist: 10 Steps to Revoke Access ↗
Existing landscape is fragmented: general offboarding checklist articles (Axipro, Checkflow, Optserv, Decryption Digest) and legal checklist PDFs (mclaw.io) but no dedicated quarterly 'trade-hygiene checkup' SaaS aimed at founder-led 10-100 person studios.Building a Trade Secret Protection Program Checklist: A Practical Checklist ↗IT Offboarding Checklist: The Complete Security Guide (2026) ↗
Small studios without legal teams will pay modestly for compliance (~$50-200/mo tier is typical), but this is a discretionary 'nice-to-have' purchase category and founders consistently defer until a near-miss or audit pushes them to act.Evaluating the Effectiveness of Trade Secret Risk Assessment Tools for ↗Essential Trade Secret Management Software Tools for Legal Compliance ↗
Trade-secret exposure is a permanent structural risk for IP-rich studios and only grows with remote work and AI tooling, but the '20-question quarterly checkup' wrapper is thin enough to be subsumed by general compliance platforms, HRIS modules, or LLM assistants.Apple Sues OpenAI, Two Former Employees for Trade Secrets Theft ↗
Trivial to ship: a static questionnaire, a scoring/risk-report template, and an email generator are a weekend build; no integrations, regulated workflows, or live data are required for v1.