Ask them what they think is fair, and also give them the option to wait longer. They may be willing to give 10x if you are willing to wait until they are at $10m revenue.
Learning to play an instrument in order to "change the world" and become the #1 rock star is worrying.
There are other factors involved, lots of people want to be rock stars, so there is a lot of competition, and many of them are very mean people who don't fight fair.
There are lots of people who wanted to become rock stars but didn't make it or aren't smart enough, and they will be jealous and try and stop you. They don't care how hard you are trying. They will even try to steal it if you succeed.
You CAN do it, but it will probably take ten or twenty years or more and be much, much, much harder than you think.
You will eventually have to become very obsessed with programming and spend 12 hours every day doing it, just like a rock star or basketball star spends all day practicing. You won't have any friends or girlfriend or normal life.
If you don't succeed, you will become mean too, and have no choice but to work for somebody else like a slave, even though you worked so hard.
That's probably what your parents worry about.
It's up to you. Are you the smartest? Are you willing to work the hardest, harder than anybody, for 20 years? Are you willing to give up your entire future?
That's what it will take to "change the world," and in reality, the world won't change very much no matter what you do.
Even Steve Jobs only really gave people new cellphones, and he spent his whole life trying that hard, and died very young because of it.
This is a great suggestion. I don't have the extra funds to hire anybody, but if I manage to launch this on my own it's likely I will.
What I meant by "enforcement" is my understanding that leadership/management has a lot to do with things like firmness in language and body language cues, etc. to maintain a power hierarchy.
Most of the people I know who are able to assume a leadership role are exactly the kind of person I'm afraid to trust to get on board since I can't defend against them taking control of the project.
Yes there is, it hasn't launched yet so I have no cash flow.
It's a big cloud project and just getting it launched and running is going to take at the very least some DevOps people.
It doesn't initially make sense to me that investors would shy away from something with so much existing value.
"I've done the heavy lifting, and that's a bad thing?" But I think you're right, I can see how fast-paced technology investors would be more interested in snapping up a large stake of a project with a greedy, determined leader.
I need more of a bank-loan sort of investment, which unfortunately I can't get because I trashed my credit.
This sounds like a good first step, thank you for the reply.
Here are the issues from my standpoint:
Even if I could afford it, I don't know how to hire someone or how to tell them what I need done (or especially actually motivate them or enforce that they'll do it).
I also don't know anybody like this personally, and it's going to be hard to trust random people from the internet.