In this podcast, we connected with Ryan DeLuca, Co-founder of BodyBuilding.com and Black Box VR. Below are some highlights of the conversation.
Listen on Spotify, Apple, Google
The early days of Bodybuilding.com - building an e-commerce empire around supplements during the rise of the Internet
Kyriakos: Ryan, it's a pleasure to see you. I was one of the first very first buyers from Bodybuilding.com, and I experienced the journey that you guys had through Bodybuilding.com and then over the years through Black Box VR, and I was super excited to do this discussion. Why don't we start by talking about how you started bodybuilding.com - I believe you started by selling creatine. Is that right?
Ryan: That's a great question. First of all, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to talk about some of my favorite subjects. We started Bodybuilding.com back in 1999. It was the beginning days of the Internet and cyberspace - you didn't use the word e-commerce yet, and I just got excited about the idea of starting a business.
I graduated high school in 1996, and I started doing some little Internet businesses and things like that and some informational reports and learning how to do search engine optimization before that was even a term. I started selling creatine first, and at that time, creatine was brand new - it was a new product on the market. People didn't know what it was. It just seemed like this really exciting new supplement that was safe, that could help improve strength, help improve muscle mass. You could go to GNC, one of the local stores here, and buy it for like $120 for a month's supply.
It was very expensive even back then. Then I thought, let's see if there's a way to get this product at wholesale, be able to put my own labels on it, and ship it directly to consumers through the Internet. And we were able to find a supplier, and we were able to sell it for something like $50 for a month's supply - much cheaper. Using many Internet marketing techniques, I'd started to learn that time just put up a small website just to see what it could do. At first, not much really happened, and I kind of thought, okay, maybe this isn't going to work. And eventually, it started to really pick up. And back then, I could only accept orders by check or money order by mail, so it's much harder to accept credit cards, and there was no PayPal type of thing. But eventually the order started coming in. It was like the first day I went back after a little vacation to see if there's any orders at the PO. Box. Usually it was empty at this time. There was, like, a big bag in the back of mail, and so it was like something had clicked, and finally we started getting orders.
Essentially I started shipping them out of the garage. That's when I thought there's something exciting here. How can we take this to the next level? And I saw that somebody owned the name bodybuilding.com, but they weren't using it. So I emailed them a couple of times. I was like, hey, this could be a really cool thing if you're not using it to buy it. And first of all, they said, no, we will use it eventually. But after about a year, they still weren't using it. So I returned to them again, like, hey, let me know. I want to buy this. And they were finally like, all right, we're busy with other things, so how much? And went back and forth, and eventually, they agreed on $20,000, which was mine. And I remember that moment just sitting in my house and seeing that email come through, and I was just like, yes, this could be a really good kickstart to a bigger vision of thousands of products. And not just selling products, but also having community and content and creating this, what we call a super site of everything you could need to get in shape and reach your goals and work out or work with other people to stay accountable.
And that's really what kicked it off. April 13th, 1999 - the website went live.
The evolution of supplements - increasing the transparency around supplements through content
Kyriakos: Before you started, the whole industry was a nontransparent way of looking at supplements.
The industry around supplements was not very transparent before you started. Most people were describing supplements as steroids. From your approach, you gave so much transparency for people to understand supplements through your content. I remember going through the ratings of the supplements that you enabled users to leave their own reviews.
That was so important - I literally think about myself doing it. I guess we can see today and say it's something obvious. But back in the day, there were no ratings. Like how did you think about doing that? What gave you the idea?
Ryan: We really led with the idea of that we wanted to build something for ourselves. What did I want as an end user, right? Less about how do we just make money and how do we extract money from people, build a big business, and get rich. It really was; what do I want?
I remember being the fourteen-year-old kid going into the gym and feeling so unsure of myself, seeing the big buff guy in the corner wishing I can ask him a question, but being so intimidated and feeling just so dumb and insecure that I was like, I'm going to make it now so that I can ask that person that question. I could be that fourteen-year-old kid and ask through these articles and get that content. Also, I really wanted to know about these products, creatine and pre-workouts, and protein powders, and what's the best ones. And it was very difficult to get real true information because, once again, it's like you're really only talking to salespeople. So I really wanted to know about these products and how they worked.
I wanted to get as much information as possible and build a page for each product that told you all about it and ask people about it. And it's interesting because it was very controversial in the beginning. Our vendors would come to me enraged because, on our forum; somebody said their product tasted bad, or it was a bad product, or it didn't work right. And that had never really been seen in the industry because before, all the product promotions were through salespeople at retail stores or magazines accepting advertisements. So they didn't want to say anything bad. And it was almost the first time some of these executives and company owners could see right here on the product page or on this forum that somebody saying something negative.
And, of course, us. The idea was, look, we want to be honest because we wanted to build a long-term business. We wanted to build something that was going to last and not something that was going to be short-term, just something that people eventually figured out was not real.
The cold start problem - how do you create something from nothing and light a fire within the community
Kyriakos: How does someone start a forum? I spoke with the founder of MyFitnessPal one day, and he told me that in the very early days, what you need to do is you have to be answering everything yourself. You have to be generating content from the beginning. How did you start the community by itself?
Ryan: It was like you said, we had to be in there ourselves, answering questions, asking questions, and trying to get people to create those discussions. And there's really no fast way because I've been asked that many times. They call it the cold start problem. Like how do you create something from nothing and light that fire in the community? And it's one of the most difficult things, and I'm sure a lot comes into it with luck and timing. But we gave the tools and the ability for people to discuss these things with each other. And we spent a lot of time in those forums ourselves. And eventually, people started raising their hands in the community, saying, hey, I'd like to be a moderator; I'd like to lead different discussions and kind of volunteer. And we engaged with them and said, hey, we would love to have you do that. A big part of the community is engaging with those types of people, right? The 1% that want to create content want to engage with other members who want to help lead and help clean things up. Those people will be worth a hundred times more than another member that might not be doing much.
A big part of it is identifying those people and helping them grow the community.
Doing things that don't scale - showing up at small community events and supporting athletes
Kyriakos: I remember I went to these events that were done in NEC where you were bringing a lot of athletes. You would bring famous athletes, give our supplements, and bring people from your videos to interact with and learn from. How did you think about going to these events, and also, did they work in the end?
Ryan: It's always hard to quantify because our website would get, let's say at certain points, millions of visitors in one day. And then these events would obviously be relatively small compared to that and very expensive compared to that. But a big part of it was supporting the industry because a lot of these smaller like Bodybuilding Fitness shows, needed support in order to support the athletes.
And the athletes in these shows are the influencers in their communities. These are the people. There may only be, say, fifty of them on stage, and not a huge audience of some of these smaller shows. Those are the trainers at their gyms. Those are the people that other people ask what do you do? What products do you use, where do you buy them? And for us to support them, give them swag and stuff that they could wear back to the gym, that made a big difference. So a big part of it was really just like, let's be grassroots supporting those communities and then going to some of the bigger events. There's kind of two reasons. One is the end user, of course, the customer. People like you to come there and engage with athletes that they may have seen on the website, engage with the products, be able to try them out because it's something you need to try.
Obviously, you can't lick your screen. We still don't have that dance to try this flavor. So you have actually to try the samples. It helped a lot with building that. But a big part was also being there for our vendors because we had hundreds of vendors that we were selling their products, and we were also working with their athletes, and we're also working with them to create content for our website. And being there and being kind of a leader in those type of events helped us to engage those partnerships.
Creating an authentic culture at Bodybuilding.com by setting up a gym in your headquarters
Kyriakos: This is a very good segway to speak a bit about culture. I've seen a lot of people who have been speaking about bodybuilding.com having a gym around the office. I saw videos of you training with some of these folks in that gym. How did you come up with this idea?
Ryan: We're authentic about what we're doing. We authentically are trying to help people reach their health, fitness, and appearance goals through information, motivation, and supplementation - this is our mission statement. Every company has a mission statement.
Every company says they're trying to do the right things, and many of them are. But we all know, right, like most companies say one thing, do something else. They say that they are trying to help change the world or be great for whatever end consumer that they have. But when they make small decisions, it's what's best for the company. What's going to make the most money? This is going to save us a little bit of money. So we're going to cut this thing out. And people really see those actions. And people want to work at a place where they can actually believe that they're making a difference and that they're not just working for a corporation or increasing shareholder value or capitalism kind of thing. And so we authentically cared about helping people because, once again, we were building the thing we wanted for ourselves, which ended up just being the thing that also helped us to grow the fastest.
And so putting a gym in the actual headquarters was a big part of that. And by the way, the gym was on the first floor. The first thing you saw when you walked in, you walked in this lobby. Our mission statement was like huge over on this side, and every one of our employees signed it with a marker. So they walk in every day, see their signature right next to the mission statement, and right past, right behind the front desk, you can see right into a big gym and people working out. And that was like the first thing you saw every single day.
Black Box VR - building a modern gym in the Metaverse
Kyriakos: I was walking in San Francisco one day, and I saw Blackbox VR, and it kind of reminded me of one announcement I saw that you were starting Blackbox, and I realized that this is the next big thing. What made you start the business, and why is the world of metaverse?
Ryan: As I mentioned, I retired in November 2015 and thought I could take a couple of years off and at least relax a little bit or travel. And did that for about six months, but got very bored as you mentioned, and also got almost depressed, where it's like, not as much of a purpose or things to focus on, no reason to read books or to improve.
So with my co-founder Preston Lewis, who had worked with me for many years at Bodybilding.com on innovation, products, and marketing, we said, let's go see this new virtual reality. There's something there. We just heard about Oculus; they just sold to Facebook for about $2 billion. We've been playing around with some of the early devices, just thinking, is there a way to use some of this stuff for Bodybuilding.com and help with some of our goals? And it felt like the early days of the Internet, where it was like this new magical technology that nobody seemed to understand, and people thought it was a fad. Like even in the early days of bodybuilding.com, it was like, what's this cyberspace thing? And why would anybody use a credit card on the Internet? And all that stuff.
And, of course, I remember arguing with people because they thought it was just this fad, and people didn't really understand it. But when you see the technology with virtual reality, you realize this is something new to the world. This is a new medium, potentially the final medium, maybe before brain-computer interfaces. But it's not just a screen on your face. It actually transports you and immerses you into a completely different environment, which, it turns out, does some really crazy things to your brain because we didn't evolve for us to see and hear and move around in an environment that's not real.
So our brain really thinks it's real. It's almost like this mini placebo effect, creating all these great, new things you can do. So we looked at and said, how can we use this new technology of VR to help with that problem, which is adherence? The biggest problem in the fitness industry by far is adherence. That's why every gym has to put you on a contract you can't get out of because they know everyone will be there on January 1st and January 14th.
They will all be gone, and nobody's reaching their goals. It used to be a joke in the industry. It's like the New Year's resolutions are coming. They're all going to be here on January 1st. But don't worry, they'll be gone in a couple of weeks, and the machines will be free again. We all laugh about it, right? And we've all been through it ourselves, but it's like this crazy societal problem. The best scientists in the world have not figured out how to crack it yet.
How do you make it so people adhere to a fitness program? 87% of people cannot adhere to a fitness program over even a short term. They can do it for a few weeks, sometimes a few months, but almost everybody stops. And if you don't adhere to your program, it doesn't matter what you're doing; it won't work. And that's why more people are overweight and obese than ever and have more metabolic diseases and problems and mental health problems that come from that. So it's a long way to say something must be solved here. And this new technology of VR, together with the principles of true gamification video games, could actually be the thing that could help people to create the habit of exercise.
