From a get-rich-quick perspective, then, the virtual White Rabbit had been a zero. Bob and JoAnn were smart marketers with MBAs from a Big Ten business school, and he had a real feel for the Internet, which he had successfully used to expand his consulting business. But even the Lilienfelds could not score right away. Oh, how tantalizing the gargantuan numbers had been—the tens of millions of users said to exist; the million by which the Net was supposed to be growing each month. And yet in the end, when the time came for customers to key in the credit card numbers, the market had vanished like the Cheshire cat. That didn’t mean the Lilienfelds were foolish; just a week or two after Christmas, a wonderful twist happened. The number of visits to the toy store fell off. But sales leapt up. By mid-January White Rabbit was moving an average of a toy a day—not a Kmart volume, but an improvement. Bob explained the difference. Now White Rabbit’s first screen told customers that the store could often get toys not mentioned online. Encouraged, Lilienfeld added yet another improvement, an 800 number. Now customers could ask their questions the old-fashioned way if they preferred, and they could also order by voice if they didn’t trust the Net with their credit card numbers. With enough tweaks like this, the virtual toy store might eventually flourish as the number of Web users grew. Just like the characters in many children’s stories, the White Rabbit would keep on changing—adding ever-more-intriguing links to newsgroups and other Web sites, putting in the software to help novice toy shoppers choose just the right ball or train set, figuring out new ways to use the interplay between the Net and the traditional media. Sooner or later, the Netheads would reproduce, and when they went looking for rattles and Lego sets, Bob and JoAnn would be ready for them. The story of White Rabbit Toys, like that of the Internet itself, was far from over. The Electronic Billboard: Grant’s Flowers Larry Grant just might be doing better at the moment than the Lilienfelds were. He was selling flowers, and what better merchandise existed for grad students who were alone at the keyboard in a dark office at two o’clock, and who had forgotten their girlfriends’ birthdays? A newsletter publisher named Rosalind Resnick—a former staff reporter for the _Miami Herald_ and the author of an Internet business guide—was grossing more than $20,000 a year in subscriptions and expecting to do much better in 1995.[2.4] And her media-oriented newsletter helped pave the way for a lucrative consulting business. I also knew of a network expert named Gordon Cook who was able to jet to a three-week research expedition in Moscow at his own expense, and who lived satisfactorily on the revenue from _The Cook Report on Internet_ and related activities.[2.5]