Most importantly you need to do lots of research and figure out if your market is really viable. ie how much competition do you have? Are people able to get the same thing somewhere else? What are you competitors doing? How successful are you competitors doing it? Bottom line you need to honestly know whether or not you should continue to take things to the next level or need to create additional things in your plugin to get more wider appeal/users and compete, etc etc etc. This should be your first priority before doing anything else.

Yep, have to agree with what several commenters said here that doing a funding campaign is probably not the optimum choice to make. It is still along the same lines of trying to get donations and very few people will donate anything for something they can get for free. Been there and done that one. ;)

So doing everything inhouse with your own API servers is one way to go, but that takes a lot of time, work and money. What about selling a Pro version on Code Canyon. That takes the burden of you having to create all the inhouse stuff in order to sell your Pro version inhouse.

This is obviously your strongest selling point - "The plugin and service blocked 710,000 sploggers its first year, 15 million the third year, and has blocked 220 million sploggers to date. Conti said its effectiveness has now reached 99%."