Collecting receipts
On the summer content style that gets people asking instead of scrolling.
Every summer the market goes a little sloppy. People drift off on holiday, the timeline slows down, and half the coaches I know quietly stop posting because the effort stops matching the reward. I don’t fight it anymore. Summer is when I put my building hat on, play loads of music, and make stuff. Come September the bear walks out of hibernation.
But the posting problem is real, and it isn’t only a summer thing. A few people came to me recently and said some version of the same sentence. I can’t be bothered to write my posts right now. Do I repurpose? Do I batch? Do I just vanish for a month and hope nobody notices? And I got it, because I’d been feeling exactly the same drag.
So I went back to something I picked up years ago, in a corner of the internet most of the people I work with have never set foot in.
I — Where I picked this up
My Twitter was never a LinkedIn kind of place. I used it for indie hacking and software, so my whole feed is developers I’ve followed since the early days, back when they’d just post open-source code and get on with it.
One of them changed his name to Maker recently, which felt like a wink from the universe given what I do now. I found him when he had a 3,000-person audience. Since then he’s had an eight-figure exit and a stack of other startups. And the thing I want you to notice is how he posts.
He doesn’t explain anything. He shares a screenshot of one of his products with two words on top, and that’s the whole post. No description. No “here’s how I did it.” Just a slice of something in motion, and a caption so thin you can’t tell what you’re looking at.
Scroll his feed and it’s screenshot after screenshot. Some are feature-driven. Some are him gaming with his kids. Every one is a little data-driven window into his world, and none of them tell you the how.
And here’s what happens underneath. People lose their minds. What is this? Where do I find it? Why can’t I buy it? Can you send me a Loom? The comments fill up with people trying to climb through the screen to understand what they’re seeing.
II — The gap is the whole thing
I sat with that pattern for a while, and the mechanism finally clicked.
When you explain everything, you give the reader nowhere to go. They nod, they maybe like it, they scroll on. The transaction is closed. But when you show the data and hold back the story, you leave a gap. And a gap is uncomfortable. People can’t sit in it. They come to you to close it.
The rule I set myself is simple. I’m not allowed to teach. I’m not allowed to tell you what I did or how I did it. I’m only allowed to tease, the way you’d flirt with someone across a bar. Enough to make them curious, not enough to satisfy them. The second you satisfy them, they leave.
I saw this play out live on a call last week. One of the members, Asmara, has run a daily practice for four and a half years and has the tracker screenshots to prove it. As she talked me through it, she started explaining the philosophy underneath it and why it had changed her business. All of it good. All of it teaching.
So I stripped it. I kept two lines. Something like: the point of doing new things is you notice what stays the same, and once you notice that, nothing stays the same again. Then the screenshot of a 229-day streak. That’s it. I have no idea what app that is. I don’t know what she does. And because she didn’t hand me the context, I’m going to come and ask for it.
That’s the trade. She gave up the satisfaction of being understood in exchange for the pull of being asked.
III — Four departments, four receipts
Once I stopped thinking of myself as a coach and started thinking of myself as a tiny startup, the receipts were everywhere. You wear a lot of hats in a week, and every hat leaves a paper trail. Here’s how I split mine, with a real one of my own for each.
Fitness. You run, you lift, you walk, maybe you cook. There’s a number buried in almost all of it. Here’s a running receipt of mine. I never say where I ran or why, and people fill that in by asking.
Marketing. You make content, and content throws off analytics and impression counts. This is a marketing receipt. A screen full of data and a line that explains none of it.
Sales. Customers turn up, money lands, a deal closes. This one is a sale. Not a testimonial and not a case study, just proof that something moved.
Build. You’ve got funnels, workshops, templates, half-finished tools for yourself or a client. This is a build receipt. A feature nobody can identify, and a caption that keeps it that way.
The magic is that most of us already sit on piles of this, and it doesn’t have to be a win. A screenshot of twenty quid in your bank account works, because it shows you’re in the weeds and moving.
I noticed the same effect when I committed to my marathon. I’d post how many times I’d run that week and nothing else. Not where, not why. And people kept sliding into my messages asking where I was running, why I was running so much, what I was running away from. I never answered directly. I just doubled down, and the reach followed the questions.
IV — The whole recipe
It’s almost too simple to write down, so here it is in full.
Pick a department. Grab a receipt, a screenshot of something you already did, whether that was yesterday or five minutes ago. Write one or two lines to tease what it is, tweet sized, no longer. Then stop. Don’t teach. Don’t explain it away.
That’s the entire move. Then you sit back and watch the comments come in. How do I get hold of this? When did you do that? That’s the sound of it working, and it’s the sound of a warm lead putting their hand up.
V — Why the humble screenshot wins right now
Here’s what surprised me.
I assumed the money screenshots would perform best. They don’t. We’ve all gone numb to them. Another growth chart, another testimonial, another person telling me they hit ten grand a month. I swipe past those without a thought, and so do you. The market has built up an immunity to the flex.
But a screenshot of a half-built feature, or a jog, or a dashboard I can’t decode, lands differently. It’s humble and it’s in the moment. It reads as someone genuinely in the middle of the work rather than someone performing the result, and that’s where the trust quietly gets built.
There’s a mechanical reason too. LinkedIn has moved onto the same kind of algorithm that runs Instagram, and that world rewards debate, saves, and comments over polished broadcasts. You’ve probably felt this. You spend two hours on a beautiful carousel and it sinks like a stone, then someone posts one silly line and it takes off. The carousel left no room for a conversation. The silly line invited one.
These receipt posts are built for that. They’re a little rude and a little too quiet, and they pull people into the comments to sort out what they just saw. I ran one over a weekend where I wrote that I’d used Claude to replace my entire sales team. Nothing else. 140,000 impressions and a full comment section of people arguing with a joke.
The other gift is speed. When the summer drag hits and I can’t face writing, I open my folder of screenshots, pick one, add a line, and I’m done. Five posts in fifteen minutes. It feels close to cheating. One of the members joked it’s like using a jumbo jet for a paper plane, and he’s right. The post is so simple you barely need help making it. You just need permission to say less.
The part I keep coming back to
We’ve been trained to believe that good content teaches. Give value, show your work, prove the result, walk them through it. And I still think there’s a place for the long, generous, teach-everything post.
But I’ve started to believe the opposite move is the one people can’t resist. Show a little. Withhold the rest. Trust that the gap between what you post and what you explain is more magnetic than any amount of explaining.
The people who ask you a question have already leaned in. You didn’t sell them, you didn’t pitch them, you just left a door slightly open and let them decide to walk through it. That’s a warmer lead than any testimonial screenshot ever gave me.
So this summer I’m going to keep collecting receipts. A run here, a sale there, a half-built feature nobody can name, a dashboard flatlining at zero. Not to prove anything. Just to stay in motion where people can see it, and to let them wonder what on earth I’m up to.
The most interesting thing you can do online might be to refuse to finish the sentence.
If you want to do this with other people watching your receipts stack up, there are 2 doors.
If you’re a builder or a maker, the type who lives in those build receipts and loves shipping funnels, workshops, templates and tools, come build in the open with us at Ship to Stay.
And if you’re more focused on marketing and inbound, on getting people to perk up and ask what you’re selling, that’s what we do inside Modern Maker on Skool.
Either way, start collecting. Your receipts are already sitting there. You just have to post them.