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I get asked about this often. When you have an online business, do you need to be the business’s public face? Are there times where you don’t have to be? Can you make money online if you’re completely anonymous? Are there benefits to one over the other?

I shall explain it all, but to fully understand these options, we need to review my concept of business models.

A Model A business means you are the business, more or less. Examples would be a consultant, coach, doctor, influencer, content creator, and so on. My two online brands, Unchained CEO and Alpha Male 2.0 are Model A businesses. I, Caleb Jones, am essentially the business. Yes, there’s a team of about 20 people behind me helping me out, but I’m the brand.

It was the same when I was a full-time business consultant. Caleb Jones was the business even though I had help.

If I were to die or completely retire tomorrow, my Model A companies might go on for a little while on their own, but very soon they would just fizzle out and die. You also can’t sell a Model A business (usually) because if the face of the business stops working the customers usually just go away.

The upside of a Model A business is that you can get from zero to huge money extremely fast. This is how I went from a complete dumbass in his twenties with no college degree or high school diploma to a six-figure income in 1990s dollars in just three years… consulting is a Model A biz, so I made money fast. I didn’t care about selling the company later or anything like that.

A Model B business is the opposite of Model A. Model B means no one cares who owns the company, and the company is a completely separate entity from the owner. Examples would be General Motors, Google, Amazon, or Wal-Mart. When people buy from these companies they don’t even know who the owner or CEO is and it doesn’t matter. Model B businesses are also assets that can be sold or retired upon. My dad had a Model B business which is why he could retire at relatively young age 55.

The downside of Model B businesses is that they take a really long time for the owner to get from zero to the money. The owner has to wait years and years while he’s starving to death and can barely pay his bills while he grows the giant, bureaucratic, complex company.

So with that background, here are the rules regarding whether you need to be the public face of the business or not:

1. If you own a Model B business, you can be more or less anonymous and it will work just fine.
2. If you own a Model A business, you should be the face of the business because you will make money faster and easier if you are.
3. If you own a Model A business in an industry where anonymous business owners are common, you can be anonymous and make money, but you will still make more money faster if you aren’t.
4. If you own a Model A business in an industry where anonymous business owners are not common, you can’t be anonymous because no one will buy from you.

To explain item #2, the hard and fast rule of business, especially online companies, is that you will always make more money if you are the public face of your Model A business. This is because people today are distrustful and cynical, as they should be in this ever-darkening era. If they can’t see your face and your real name, they are far less likely to give you their money because of the distrust factor.

Can you make money as an anonymous online personality? Yes, you can, because I did it for years under the name Blackdragon when I had an online business selling dating advice for men. I made six figures doing that for a long time, and I was in an industry (PUA) where people hiding their identities was common. However! I could have made at least TRIPLE what I made back then had I just outed myself as Caleb Jones many years before I actually did so. I regret not doing that sooner, and I left perhaps a million dollars or more on the table by not doing that.

I can tell you for a fact that my online income more than tripled as soon as I went public with my real name, real pictures of me, and videos of me so people could see I was indeed a real, interesting, and dynamic human being and not some angry troll in a basement somewhere typing on a keyboard. Today, many years later, that income has almost 10X’ed; that would not have happened if I was still anonymous.

To explain item #3 above, if you are in an industry where it’s common for business owners and content providers to be 100% anonymous, being anonymous yourself won’t be as detrimental. Back in my day, an example of this was PUA. Today, a good example is crypto; lots of big crypto guys on Twitter are totally anonymous and they make it work because it’s “not weird” to see anonymous crypto nerds in that industry.

But again, those same nerds would make a hell of a lot more money if they were public. They would probably argue that, for them, their anonymity is “worth” not having a higher income. This is a decision you need to make for yourself. (I personally like money, but that’s me.)

To explain item #4 above, if you are a content provider or other type of Model A business owner in an industry where it is not common for these people to be anonymous, then you simply can’t be anonymous. For example, imagine being a B2B business consultant and being 100% anonymous. No one will hire you no matter how good your marketing or branding is. You’d just be wasting your time. If you truly wanted to be anonymous, you’d have to choose a completely different niche.

So really, it’s a question of how important your anonymity is to you. If it’s more important than income, then fine, choose a niche where anonymity is common and go right ahead. If income is your priority, then take some nice photos, get on YouTube, and show the world your shining face, even if you think you’re ugly, fat, uninteresting, or stupid-looking. None of that shit matters; you’ll generate instant trust with a decent percentage of your audience and you’ll make bigger money and make it more quickly.

Everyone is going to have a different set of opinions and priorities regarding this, and there is no right answer (as long as your business is 100% location-independent and you make at least the UCEO minimum income of $85K/year in pretax net profit).

My personal opinion on this, and this is just me, is that my highest and ultimate priority, at least in my life right now, is income. Nothing else matters. Therefore, I choose to be 100% public and have doubled down on that in the past 4-5 years. Shit, I will show people as much of my real life as I possibly can, and predictably, this has worked for me financially.

The key point here is that, as I’ve said many times, I’m a total introvert and I have no desire whatsoever for anyone to know anything about me. I don’t want to be famous in any way whatsoever and I personally think famous people live miserable lives and put up with all kinds of bullshit and risk that non-famous people never have to worry about. I mean, holy shit, look at all the crap people like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump, Britney Spears, Alec Baldwin, and Mel Gibson have gone through, just to name a few. Jesus, no thank you. I prefer happiness.

I’d rather just quietly type away on my keyboard and live my wonderful life with my international flags, companies, and women with no one knowing what I’m doing. That really is my preference… but I want the money more.

Therefore, again as I’ve said many times before, my goal is to hit my financial goals by being as least famous as possible. I want to make millions of dollars with only a tiny amount of people knowing who I am. I’m the complete opposite of people like Grant Cardone, Taylor Swift, or Andrew Tate whose entire goal is to be super famous and known by as many people as possible.

This is why I make a 7-figure income with an embarrassingly pathetic YouTube channel with only 11K subscribers and a lot of my videos there get less than 1K views. Sometimes random haters make fun of this, but they don’t realize (or understand) that this is exactly the way I want it. I’ve said that I don’t want more than 40K subscribers/followers on any one of my social media platforms, ever. With the way my companies are arrayed, 40K subscribers/followers or even less would be more than enough to hit all of my financial goals for the rest of my life.

This an unusual and hard-to-understand belief in an era where the number one thing young people want is to be famous, and where everyone incorrectly thinks that followers = income.

But don’t copy me. Come up with your own set of priorities and follow the four rules listed above regarding how well you want to be known, and then get to work.

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