Next Time Suggestion for Kickstarter
My suggestion for the next Kickstarter campaign is to break development down into smaller expansions.
Put together a package that would realistically take your current team 3-6 months to complete and plan for 2 expansions a year.
As the team grows more features would be able to be added to each expansion.
I think this would be a much better approach than trying to setup a kickstarter campaign for increasing the size of your team.
Also, once each expansion is ready to be added to the main server give about 2-3 weeks worth of promoting the launch date for the expansion before its released.
Instead of doing small patch releases where changes/additions to the game go unnoticed, using expansion this game can be promoted better.
The last thing would be to setup a page on this website that talks about the upcoming expansion. As features that are going to be part of the expansion are guaranteed to make it to release give a little info about what they are adding more and more info as the expansion nears release.
Just my 2 cents, I really think this would promote the game a lot better than just patching in each feature as it's completed.
My overall suggestion is to follow EVE's expansion model, it's very similar to what I describe.
One last thing I would like to mention when setting up the next Kickstarter campaign, it ran for 30 days and generated 8k dollars.
My suggestion is to calculate how much it cost for paying your staff for 6 months and stick to that amount. (as the staff grows for new kickstarter campaigns the amount will go up, but so will the amount of people playing/donating for development)
If the Kickstarter funds can pay for the salaries, the upgraded monthly subs is just extra money coming in.
