The certification process is substantive rather than a badge purchase. It involves a detailed assessment across governance, workers, community, environment, and customers, scoring above a threshold, verification, a legal commitment to consider stakeholder impact, and recertification on a cycle. Fees scale with revenue. For a business in its first year, the practical obstacle is usually that much of what is assessed does not yet exist, since you cannot demonstrate employee practices without employees.
On technology specifically, the effect is smaller than expected but not zero. The assessment asks about data practices, privacy, and supplier relationships, so how you handle customer information and who you buy from can contribute. Nothing requires particular software. What it does encourage is documentation, because the assessment asks for evidence of policies rather than intentions, and a business that has written down how it handles data scores better than one that behaves identically without a document.
The honest question to ask before pursuing it is what you expect it to do. If your customers are consumers who research this, or you sell to organisations with procurement requirements around it, the certification can carry real commercial value. If your customers do not know what it is, the effort may return more if spent elsewhere, and you can still adopt the practices without the certification.
A reasonable middle path for a first year business is to complete the free assessment without pursuing certification. It functions as a structured audit of practices you should be considering anyway, it identifies gaps, and it costs nothing but the afternoon.
Consider the recertification requirement before starting, because this is a recurring commitment rather than a one time achievement. The standard is periodically revised and generally becomes more demanding, which means practices adequate at first certification may not be at renewal. A business that treats it as a badge earned rather than a standard maintained will find the renewal considerably harder than the original application.
There is a simpler alternative worth knowing for businesses in states that offer it, which is registering as a benefit corporation. That is a legal structure rather than a certification, it costs almost nothing, and it permits directors to consider stakeholder interests alongside profit. It carries no verification and therefore less external credibility, and for a business whose motivation is the governance rather than the marketing, it achieves the substance at a fraction of the effort.