A prototype took about 8 months, but a prototype is nothing like a full-on consumer product. The final product took us about 1.5 years. I think a lot of people don't ever get to see how hard it is to design something that can be built 10,000 or 100,000 or 1,000,000 times. If your failure rate is even 1% then it will never be a viable business. We put all our eggs into one basket---spending our time and money on building something great rather than building a cheap product and relying on a good sales team.
