Needless to say, even in this relative trivial project we're doing verification + FPGA validation.
The exact status of the project:
We've submitted final net list to Global Unichip, the tapeout will be in the beginning of May.
One positive thing you could do to assuage the prospective customers is to post some concrete technical information about both your present chip and the future ones.
There is literally a lot of info that you could post without disclosing anything detrimental to the technical competitiveness of your project, e.g. some results of simulations like noise margins versus supply voltage.
If you need inspiration please go read bitfury's past posts.