The 12 factors that determine whether a corporate side business is traceable back to you, and how to read your own score.
An earlier version of this page published a benchmark distribution, an average score, a five-band distribution and per-factor averages, attributed to a self-reported case corpus from an Invisible Exit member community.
No such case corpus exists. The Stealth Score assessment runs entirely in your browser and stores nothing: api/stealth-badge.js persists no results and the assessment page makes no network calls, so scores have never been collected, let alone aggregated. Those figures were fabricated and have been removed rather than restated.
What was real, and is kept below, is the 12-factor framework itself, a rubric for the risk vectors, not a measurement of anyone.
Each factor is a distinct way a side business can be linked back to an employed founder. Score yourself honestly on each; the value is in finding which vectors are open, not in the total.
| # | Factor | The exposure it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Entity separation | Operating as a sole proprietorship puts your legal name on the business |
| 2 | Domain privacy | WHOIS records and contact emails exposed on the domain |
| 3 | Payment anonymity | Personal payment handles show your full name to every customer |
| 4 | Social media exposure | Shared devices and accounts linking business and personal identities |
| 5 | Banking separation | Revenue commingled into a personal account |
| 6 | IP & non-compete risk | Operating in a field adjacent to your employer's |
| 7 | Time separation | Work performed on employer time, hardware or network |
| 8 | Communication compartmentalisation | A shared email provider linking both identities |
| 9 | Physical address exposure | A home address on public filings or registrations |
| 10 | LinkedIn exposure | The side business linked from a professional profile |
| 11 | Tax filing risk | Self-prepared filings with no professional review |
| 12 | Industry overlap risk | Moonlighting clauses that specifically cover your sector |
The Stealth Score is a 12-factor rubric built from firsthand experience running an anonymous micro-SaaS while employed, plus publicly documented cases of side businesses being traced back to employees. Each factor maps to a documented linkage vector.
It is a diagnostic, not a measurement. Invisible Exit collects no assessment results and publishes no score distribution, averages or population statistics, there is no dataset behind this page, and any figure claiming otherwise was removed on 25 July 2026. A score is useful only as a checklist of which vectors you have left open. This is not legal advice.
Take the 90-second assessment and see which of the 12 vectors you have left open. Runs in your browser; nothing is stored. Free.
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