PAACT

Born at a hackathon, built in a week

PAACT was born at Innov Hack Paris, January 2026. Nicolas Philippe (Nick0) and his team of four won first place among 150 participants in a 10-hour nonstop hackathon. First hackathon he ever entered. The concept was too good to leave as a prototype, so he went home and built the full iOS app in seven days.

The core insight: people fail their goals because quitting is free. There are no real consequences. What if giving up actually cost you money?

Quitting is free. That's the problem.

New Year's resolutions have a 9% success rate. Gym memberships spike in January and flatline by March. People set goals, feel motivated for a week, then quietly abandon them. The issue isn't willpower or motivation. It's that there's no penalty for quitting.

You can drop a goal at any time and nothing happens. No one notices, no one cares, no money lost. PAACT fixes that by making quitting expensive.

Commitment contracts backed by real money

You set a goal, stake real money on it, and pick a deadline. Hit the goal, keep your money. Fail, you lose it. No extensions, no excuses.

The psychology behind it is loss aversion. People are roughly twice as motivated to avoid losing something as they are to gain something of equal value. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proved this in 1979 with Prospect Theory. PAACT turns that cognitive bias into a productivity tool. Instead of fighting human nature, it weaponizes it.

Research from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania has shown that commitment contracts increase goal completion rates by 2-3x compared to simple intention-setting.

One loop, no gimmicks

• Goal creation. Set clear, measurable goals with specific deadlines. No vague intentions. "Lose 5kg by March 15" not "get in shape."
• Financial stakes. Commit real money to each goal. You choose the amount. Could be 5 euros, could be 500. The stakes are real and the amount is locked.
• Progress tracking. Visual progress indicators so you always know where you stand relative to your deadline. Clean graphs, no gamification gimmicks.
• Smart notifications. Automated reminders as your deadline approaches. Gentle at first, increasingly urgent as time runs out.
• Minimal interface. Every screen stripped to essentials. Black and white. Your goals, your money, your deadline. Nothing else.

Zero Swift experience to App Store in seven days

Nick0 had never written a single line of Swift before this project. Zero iOS experience. Picked up Swift, learned SwiftUI's declarative paradigm, understood Core Data for local persistence, and shipped a complete, polished iOS app in seven days.

All design done from scratch. No templates, no Figma kits, no UI libraries. Every screen, every interaction, every micro-animation designed and built by one person. The information architecture was planned on paper, then translated directly into SwiftUI views.

Data stays entirely on device using Core Data. No server, no account creation, no cloud sync. Your goals and your money commitments are private by default.

Speed, taste, and deliberate constraint

Zero knowledge of a language to a complete App Store app in seven days. New language, new framework, new platform, new paradigm (declarative UI). Solo.

The feature set is deliberately constrained. One loop: create goal, stake money, track, resolve. No social features, no leaderboards, no streaks. Constraint is a design choice, not a limitation.

PAACT is live. The app does one thing and does it well.