Kayla Elderkin: You Don’t Have to Share Your Personal Life to Build an Online Business

Kayla Elderkin

Spend a few minutes on Instagram or TikTok, and a pattern becomes obvious. The accounts with the biggest audiences often feel the most personal. Daily routines, family moments, children growing up in real time. It can make it seem like success online comes down to how much of your life you’re willing to show.

For many women, especially mothers, that creates a quiet pressure. If visibility drives growth, and growth drives income, then holding anything back can feel like falling behind.

But that assumption doesn’t always hold up.

Kayla Elderkin, a Co-Founder of The Digital Hub, points out that what people see online is often a narrow version of what works. “That’s what success has looked like for years,” she says. When similar types of content dominate a platform, it’s easy to mistake them for the only path forward.

Still, there’s a difference between sharing parts of your life and making your private life part of your business.

Kayla is clear about where she draws that line. She talks openly about what her work has allowed her to do as a parent, travel, flexibility, and being present with her kids, but she avoids sharing identifying or sensitive details about them. No names, no schools, no specifics that extend beyond her control.

That distinction tends to get lost in the broader conversation.

How the pressure builds

Most people don’t set out to overshare. It usually happens in small steps.

A post performs well, so you share something similar. Then a bit more. Over time, the boundary shifts without much thought. When content is tied to income, the incentive to keep going is hard to ignore.

There’s also a comparison effect. If other creators are growing quickly while sharing more of their personal lives, it can feel like holding back is a disadvantage.

But growth based on access comes with trade-offs that aren’t always obvious at the start.

The risks behind the content

One of the biggest issues is permanence. Content posted online doesn’t disappear in the way people expect. Even if something is deleted, it may have already been saved, shared, or archived.

When children are involved, this digital footprint takes on a different weight. They don’t choose what gets shared about them, yet they may live with the consequences long after the content is posted. The scale of this risk is more than just a theoretical concern; it is reflected in increasingly alarming global data.

A groundbreaking report from Childlight, hosted by the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Human Dignity Foundation, indicates that one in eight, or 12.6%, of the world’s children have been victims of non-consensual taking, sharing, and exposure to sexual images and video in the past year. That amounts to about 302 million young people.

There are also safety concerns beyond large-scale data. Public figures have dealt with harassment, unwanted attention, and the exposure of personal information. As accounts grow, the audience becomes less predictable.

Beyond that, there’s a more subtle question: what belongs to you to share, and what doesn’t?

Kayla Elderkin frames it practically. Share your own experiences, your own decisions, your own perspective. But think carefully before turning someone else’s private life, especially a child’s, into content.

Rethinking what a business actually needs

Kayla Elderkin

A lot of the pressure to share comes from a misunderstanding of what actually drives income online. It’s easy to assume that personality and constant personal access are the main assets. In reality, many sustainable online businesses are built on something far more practical: offering useful information or a clear, specific outcome.

Kayla Elderkin focuses on that distinction. Instead of building a brand around her personal life, she emphasizes building a brand around value, whether that’s teaching a skill, organizing information, or creating something people can use in their own lives.

This shift is happening alongside a broader movement. The growth of women in business continues to accelerate, not just as a financial trend, but as a lifestyle decision. Women launched 49% of new businesses in 2024, a 69% increase, the highest in five years. Much of that growth is being driven by women who are also navigating motherhood, where time, energy, and attention are constantly divided.

For many, entrepreneurship is not about visibility; it’s about flexibility. It offers a way to work around school schedules, family responsibilities, and the unpredictability that comes with raising children. According to Block Advisors’ State of Women’s Small Business Report, 92% of women entrepreneurs want to be their own boss, and 89% want to set their own schedules. That desire reflects something deeper than income: the need for control over how and when work happens.

In that context, building a business that doesn’t rely on sharing personal life becomes not just a preference, but a practical solution. It allows women, especially mothers, to create income without feeling like they have to constantly be “on” or publicly visible.

To achieve that balance, many entrepreneurs are turning to value-based models that prioritize expertise over personal transparency:

●      Digital products like guides, templates, or courses

●      Affiliate recommendations tied to a specific niche

●      Educational or skill-based content

●      Niche accounts that don’t rely on showing a personal life at all

In these models, growth isn’t tied to how much someone reveals about themselves. It’s tied to how useful their work is, making it a more sustainable and flexible path, especially for those building a business alongside family life.

Building trust without full transparency

One of the most common concerns is that limiting personal content will make it harder to build a genuine connection with an audience. But in practice, trust doesn’t come from constant access to someone’s private life. It’s built through clarity, consistency, and delivering on what you promise.

People don’t need to see every detail to believe something is real. What matters more is whether they understand what you do, why you do it, and whether it actually helps them. When those elements are clear, trust can grow naturally, without the need for full personal exposure.

A different way to think about growth

At the same time, the idea that more visibility automatically leads to better results is starting to shift. As online business becomes more common, there’s a growing awareness that not all growth strategies are equal.

Some approaches depend heavily on attention and personal sharing, which can be difficult to sustain, especially for those balancing business with family life. Others are built on systems, skills, and repeatable value, offering a more stable and flexible path forward.

For anyone starting, a more useful question than “What should I share?” might be, “What actually makes this business work?”

More often than not, the answer has far less to do with exposure and far more to do with creating something consistently useful.