Since academic researchers are your customers, would you mind sharing a few tips on how to get your product in front of academic staff?
I'd assume the university department has to approve this expense, or do researchers pay out of their own pocket to avoid budget justification?
I haven't use bioviz (very cool though!) but it would be paid the same as journal open access fees (which can cost 1000s of dollars and are paid by the authors), through grants. The individual academics usually have full control of their grant money. For large purchases (here above 8000$ or so) the university asks for a competitive tender process or proof that only one vendor exists.
Very few research purchases require departement approval, and physical science professors are pretty used to spending large amount of money on software and equipment. For example, I'm currently working with two programs for which we pay about 20k$ in license fees a year.
Front end: Vue, vuetify, vuex, NGL, three.js/webgl, d3.js, 100% typescript, yarn, webpack Back end: node.js, express, Firebase, GCE, Blender, ffmpeg, docker, CUDA
Why? Vue for pretty UI & ease of coding, NGL for beautiful molecular graphics, Firebase because it makes getting from 0 to 1 easy, Blender because of Cycles renderer & scriptability.
Have choices impacted success? Definitely! Faster iteration leads to better UX, good architecture leads to stronger foundation, and standard tech means I can on-board a contractor when needed.