Ask HN: How to manage early-stage bizdev negotiations?

I have been bootstrapping a project for a couple of years now; for present purposes, we can call it SaaS for a specialized domain, but one where there are a number of high-value potential customers, as well as a large number of smaller customers. I'm at MVP if not a bit more, and an starting to take on some "shakedown" users in preparation for a private beta. Thus far, I've been building the whole thing myself, but I'm now at the point where this is no longer viable: if this is going to be real, I need to get some funding to support both technical and business development, and I need to get contacts among those high-value customers, neither of which I have at the moment. However, I've met a bizdev guy who knows the industry the project is targeted towards, who gets the idea behind the project, and sees the potential value in it. We've begun a discussion about how he might get involved to (at least as a start) make some connections with some of those high-value customers and bring in some seed funding or collaborators. In particular, there is a major trade show coming up in about a month that would be an excellent place to pitch to some of these folks, assuming that he and I could work out a deal to get him involved. So, finally, the question: what's the best way for me to manage this dance? We've had some loose talk about buying his time by the month, week, or hour, with some tradeoff between cash and equity, towards the goal of building a pitch and taking it to the trade show. I have some cash I can put into this, but not an infinite amount. I currently hold all the equity in the project; I certainly get the point that X% of something is better than 100% of nothing, but I don't want to give away the farm, either, especially at this very early stage. In any case, there are clearly people on this list that know WAY more about this sort of thing than I do; would any of them care to offer some advice? I really don't want to screw this thing up; thanks!