That actually isn't his point. He's very clear that what he's talking about is that your cost of living should be counted as a business cost. Once your business is covering your cost of living, he says that you should count it as profitable, even though you're not yet making the salary that you could.
But that's obviously stupid. See my other comments. If you stop working on it and pay someone 800 per month to maintain it and do nothing else, and ten years later the account payments go into has 200k in it, what, is that 200k from another dimension? This is so obviously wrong. The article is completely wrong economically, and can be summarized as: "Don't say you're profitable from day 1: say what you mean, that your business is cash-flow positive with respect to its own business expenses other than your original time in developing it." whoop-de-doo. not an important semantic distinction, but I will grant the author it.
I will not grand the author the contention that you shouldn't tell people if this is the case.
The difference is that the author is implicitly assuming that you've got a business that requires your active involvement to keep going.
If the business requires 0 energy from you, and makes money, then his point becomes much less relevant. But most of the businesses in question are not like that. You have paperwork to keep them going, decisions to make, customers to serve...
