[Nzen]

For an EV certificate, you need to have a government-registered business [0], though a record of Doing Business As should be sufficient. Where I live, that involves filling a form, paying a fee, and taking out a classified add for 3 weeks [1]. There are cheaper certificates, OV, that merely require a notary public's confirmation (which is what I did).

However, as the other post said, Windows will treat an EV certificate with very high trust and should not show SmartScreen. For OV signed software, it looks like [3] Microsoft will use some telemetry to assemble a trust score as people download and accept the risk of running the software, over days or weeks.

[0] https://support.ksoftware.net/support/solutions/articles/358... KSoftware is a sales partner for Sectigo. I used their service and later Sectigo directly, before last year's change to require FIPS hardware for managing the code signing certificate.

[1] https://www.cookcountyclerkil.gov/vital-records/business-not...

[2] https://support.ksoftware.net/support/solutions/articles/232...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/65653792/504994