Thanks for reading! >What is the current disposition of Zestful, have you ultimately found any users? It's currently in maintenance mode. My only cost is a si

Thanks for reading! >What is the current disposition of Zestful, have you ultimately found any users? It's currently in maintenance mode. My only cost is a single Heroku instance, and I can actually downgrade to the free tier if I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of performance. I haven't found users. A few clients said they have project plans that will include Zestful, but they don't sound very definite. I think it's possible that it will eventually get a bit of business if a new project searches for an ingredient parsing API and chooses mine among the options available. >What technique did you settle on for parsing ingredient lists? I used linear-chain conditional random fields. I based my design on similar work by the New York Times a few years ago: https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-structured-data-from-recipes-using-conditional-random-fields/ https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/extracting-structu... I have a blog series about how I cleaned up their code and used it as the foundation for Zestful: https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/ https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/ >Do you use Zestful yourself, did you retrofit it on to any of your prior project ideas? Yep, I use it on KetoHub, my keto recipe search engine: https://ketohub.io/ https://ketohub.io/ >Besides validating demand sooner what else would you do differently next time? Good question. I'm not sure. I might adjust the money I spent on contractors. For this project, I spent about $8k on a Python developer to assist me with development, but I know Python pretty well. The money might have been spent better hiring someone to make a basic website because I'm not good at web design and I'm not crazy about the page I created. At the same time, I do want to get better at web design and not be dependent on contractors for all my web stuff because that slows down the process. I might try hiring someone to create a boilerplate site/theme then work from there. >What project are you doing next? Someone has approached me about potentially building a product for curating cryptocurrency news. I'm interested because I like cryptocurrency and it feels like it plays to my strengths, but we're still early in the process.