300 words • reading time 1 minute

Last night, my friend and I had a stupid thought. To see if we can build & deploy something in three hours flat. The result is http://www.FAddict.io.

The concept is simple, you make a pledge to see how long you can go without Facebook, if you beat 30 days you get your pledge back, if not we keep it.

Building this in 3 hours was no easy task. no easy task at first glance, but life became easier when we chose to use as many third party api’s as possible.

First we decided not to go down the MongoDB route, instead use Parse. http://www.Parse.com. allowed us in basically 2 minutes to build a backend with queries going. Very fast, very quick.

We also obviously built this on Node.js, anything else and it would take to much time to configure or setup. my expertise are in Node.js, so anything else would take too much time for me.

For checkout, we use http://www.Stripe.com. Forget PayPal, takes too long to setup. We just dropped Stripe’s new Checkout API and bada-bing-bada-boom. Were in business.

To design the website? Obviously Bootstrap, but we used http://www.JetStrap.com to mockup the entire thing, downloaded the Zip. Added Handlebars tempting to it, and voila we have in 3 hours FAddict.io

To send emails? http://www.PostMarkApp.com , simple NodeAPi got us sending Emails in 10 minutes.

We started to market it and got a few people trying it out, I don’t think I can last 30 days without facebook, but who knows I might give it a try also.

Try it out! Let us know what you think!

Edit: At the risk of sounding cheesy, we originally did not disclose the fact that when someone loses a pledge, we will be donating it to http://www.camh.ca/en/hospital/Pages/home.aspx Center for mental health and addiction.