marianattestad

Visualization software for genomics scientists at https://omgenomics.com/circa

I made it during a 2017 sabbatical between my PhD and getting a "real job" and it's been passive ever since.

Tech stack: * D3.js for visualization and actually the whole UI. * Electron to make it a desktop application, which also means users' data is stored on their own computers. * Selling on Gumroad. * Website with landing page and usage info is in Jekyll on GitHub pages. Aside from that, no servers :)

I chose this because I had used D3.js a lot before, and making it a desktop application is just what works best for users and prevents outages. I would probably make all the same choices again.

Yup, I sell my software on Gumroad too and would recommend it. They even have support for software license numbers, though I haven't used that myself.

I do happen to currently hold a data visualization job at a genomics software company, which traces back partly to when I gave a talk there that included Circa and other visualization tools I built, the rest of which are open source and free since I built them during my PhD :)

I chose the one-time cost model for several reasons: 1) the way scientists get reimbursed from grants is difficult for recurring purchases, 2) one-time pricing is easy to do and fits well with desktop software, 3) Circa is a product scientists only use occasionally, maybe a few times a year, so with a monthly model they would probably just cancel and resubscribe when they need it, which is more of a hassle for both them and me. Circa does lend itself well to desktop software because it allows saving the visualizations they are building straight to their computer instead of me trying to manage user accounts and storage in the cloud -- again, less hassle on both sides!

On the topic of more expensive licensing for some customers, I forgot to mention that for commercial entities it costs $200, but that accounts only for something like 5% of sales, since it's mostly academics who want to make pretty plots for their publications.

http://omgenomics.com/circa Circa is an easy-to-use tool for building circos plots with genomics data. I built the visualization piece (and most of the UI) with D3.js and made it into a desktop app with Electron. Initially sold it for $25 per user (one-time cost), which made about $750 a month. Then some professors told me it was way too cheap, so I increased the price to $100. Since then, it has made about $1,500 every month for the last year. This week I started to add some new features and will soon make some more demo videos to see if I can increase that number. :) I think it has worked this well so far because building circos plots is a well-known painful problem in the genomics field. And it was one that I had experienced myself during my PhD work. I was surprised at how many academics actually are willing to pay for software, but still unsure how big that market actually is and how much of it I am already covering. The nice thing about a tiny niche like this is that when you Google "circos", Circa's tutorial and demo videos show up on the first page.

Author here: I made Circa because creating circos plots was very difficult and time-consuming when I had to do it during my PhD research. Increasingly people who have genomic data to show are biologists who can't or won't spend days writing code to get a nice circos plot for publication or presentations, so I made a GUI desktop app that helps them do it. I made it extremely flexible so they can style it in every way imaginable, but I tried to keep the UI intuitive and very easy to use. Circa is a desktop application made with Electron and D3, and it is the first product from my new business OMGenomics, where I also put out free educational bioinformatics content in the form of YouTube videos.

Nice article. Good explanation of what some of the major numbers and features mean in a practical sense.