History of bb.com: Live video chat Friday 5-30-08 with the DeLuca brothers

[Chick]

Hmmm.  Perhaps it would be best for Bob to come into this thread and clarify what he meant and/or said.  Personally, it sounds like a little light-hearted joke to me.

No problem...

240 was blabbing something about buying supplements or that he wasn't going to buy supps at BB.com....something to that effect. I, in turn, doubted he ever bought anything from BB.com, and said I could find out fairly easily if he ever did, as he was claiming...

Never mentioned anything about looking into peoples personal accounts, credit card info, or anything remotely having to do with anyone but, 240....

All the rest was implyed, made up, or exaggerated by 240 and the rest of the lemmings....

240 then took it upon himself to write an email to Ryan, trying to get me fired...as he's done another time on a diferent matter...oth parties basically told him to get lost.

the end.

[G o a t b o y]

Really? By all means look it up and post it.....never happened.

Bob, it was deleted early on, but 240 saved it.  I can't believe you're saying you don't remember this, as it was a pretty good owning. I'm sure 240 or anyone else who was around back then remembers.  Bigdumbell does (see above).  You know, it's this kind of thing that causes these jabs at you to take on a life of their own.  If you had just said "I got carried away in a heated discussion, end of story" it would have died long ago.

[Chick]

Bob, it was deleted early on, but 240 saved it.  I can't believe you're saying you don't remember this, as it was a pretty good owning. I'm sure 240 or anyone else who was around back then remembers.  Bigdumbell does (see above).  You know, it's this kind of thing that causes these jabs at you to take on a life of their own.  If you had just said "I got carried away in a heated discussion, end of story" it would have died long ago.

Bullshit...240 can post whatever he saved. I stand by what was said. There was no "owning" of any sort. He was exposed immediately as reading what he wanted to, into my post, and simply making up the part about looking up people's CC info....never happened. What causes the peanut gallery to take jabs, are people like you that perpetuate falsehoods and cant comprehend what they read...

Even this statement you make is wrong....where do I say "I don't remember this"?

Classic....

[emn1964]

Bullshit...240 can post whatever he saved. I stand by what was said. There was no "owning" of any sort. He was exposed immediately as reading what he wanted to, into my post, and simply making up the part about looking up people's CC info....never happened. What causes the peanut gallery to take jabs, are people like you that perpetuate falsehoods and cant comprehend what they read...

Even this statement you make is wrong....where do I say "I don't remember this"?

Classic....

didn't you also claim to have some ownership in the company?  is this true?

[Special Ed]

What the heck is this?? I had just booked the DeLucas for next Monday's Big Nation

Seriously, I'm looking forward to this. Can I borrow someone's screenname for an hour?

[G o a t b o y]

Bullshit...240 can post whatever he saved. I stand by what was said. There was no "owning" of any sort. He was exposed immediately as reading what he wanted to, into my post, and simply making up the part about looking up people's CC info....never happened. What causes the peanut gallery to take jabs, are people like you that perpetuate falsehoods and cant comprehend what they read...

Even this statement you make is wrong....where do I say "I don't remember this"?

Classic....

Hey, I'm just telling you what I remember of the situation. It was 2 or 3 years ago.  240 could probably clear this up if he still has the posts saved.  Hell, let's ask the "peanut gallery"... I'm sure lots of people around here remember it.

[jaejonna]

Chick said that he can look up anyone who ever bought from BB.com if he wanted to ....what a faggo t ass bitch ...

[MisterMagoo]

What causes the peanut gallery to take jabs, are people like you that perpetuate falsehoods and cant comprehend what they read...

more fun to spew bile over something that didn't happen than be forced to be reasonable about something that did.

Chick said that he can look up anyone who ever bought from BB.com if he wanted to ....what a faggo t ass bitch ...

that i remember, actually. figured it meant he could see where shipments were made.

[Blockhead]

 Poetic Justice or a case of keeping your friends close and enemies closer...

 240 used to terrorize Chick back in the day, he was a subject to Chick's nightmares and the fly in his ointment.

 Now...240 is a colleague of Chick with PBW.

 It's amazing how it all comes full circle.

[Chick]

didn't you also claim to have some ownership in the company?  is this true?

No...

[richardbarnet]

What the heck is this?? I had just booked the DeLucas for next Monday's Big Nation

Seriously, I'm looking forward to this. Can I borrow someone's screenname for an hour?

LOL, it's been scheduled on BB.com for about 3 weeks.  And no worries on the fake screenname, it's easy enough to make a new screenname on JTV, heaven knows the miscers do it all the time.   

[G o a t b o y]

240 then took it upon himself to write an email to Ryan, trying to get me fired...as he's done another time on a diferent matter...oth parties basically told him to get lost.
.

Did 240 really try to get you fired??  I thought that was just board bullshit.  That's carrying things way too far if he did.

[240 is Back]

240 and the rest of the lemmings....

Careful.  I'm playing nice.  Calling me names like "lemming" isn't cool.  Ripping open old scabs when I've played nice for so long isn't a good idea. 

[Chick]

Careful.  I'm playing nice.  Calling me names like "lemming" isn't cool.  Ripping open old scabs when I've played nice for so long isn't a good idea. 

I actually name you as the leader..."240 and the rest of the lemmings"  Take a compliment when given

[emn1964]

Careful.  I'm playing nice.  Calling me names like "lemming" isn't cool.  Ripping open old scabs when I've played nice for so long isn't a good idea. 

Hey lemming leader 240, didn't bob claim some ownership interest in bb.com?

[240 is Back]

I actually name you as the leader..."240 and the rest of the lemmings"  Take a compliment when given

Are you calling me a lemming, Bob?

[Chick]

Are you calling me a lemming, Bob?

I guess you can read whatever you want into it...you know, like you do everything else.

[Blockhead]

Did 240 really try to get you fired??  I thought that was just board bullshit.  That's carrying things way too far if he did.

Goatboy,

 We're talking about a board where a fat sloppy black cakeboy prints up every single picture he can find of Derek Anthony to fax, and mail to every police precinct in a 50 mile radius of Long Island to ruin his chance of Derek to work as a cop and then anonymously purchase every single underground 'members only' videos of Derek to send to his parents home, family of his girlfriend and grandparents.

[affy]

his story is pretty amazing

very motivating for young entrepreneurs.  Talk about being at the right place at the right time though.  He posted this a while back on bb.com

I've been writing some stuff about the beginning of Bodybuilding.com for our orientation program, so I guess I can share that here to get started:

----
How Bodybuilding.com Started: The Very Beginning

In 1995, I was fighting acne while the Internet was just starting to become popular. I was a big fan of computers and was lucky enough to be able to "get online" before a lot of my friends even knew what that meant. I was already dating my future wife, Bryna, and her mom worked at Micron. Micron provided her mom with a computer and an Internet connection through the Prodigy Internet service. From the very beginning, I was in awe of what you could do and find online. I spent a lot of time at Bryna's house surfing around, even while she was out working at TCBY.

I worked hard to become an expert on the Internet, and eventually made my first web page. I was so proud of it and showed it off to kids at school while we were in the library. I thought it was crazy that this HTML page that I made was magically viewable from any computer! This seems so basic now, but it really was amazing back then.

Soon I heard that people were making money from home on the Internet, and I wanted a piece of it. I read everything I could on business and entrepreneurship, while my friends were partying and hitting on girls. I started writing "special reports" that I could sell to others. I wrote about everything from getting in shape (I loved bodybuilding even more than computers), to how to use the Internet, how to start an Internet business, and getting your web page to come up at the top of the search engines. I couldn't accept credit cards, so people had to send cash in the mail. I charged $5 for each report, and it only took me a few seconds to e-mail the report to each customer.

I promoted the reports using my search engine promotion techniques and soon my mom started asking me why we were getting so many random letters in the mail. I started receiving three to four cash orders per day. That doesn't seem like a lot, but back in high school, getting $150 per week for doing almost nothing was pretty unbelievable to me. I never had money like that.

I was hooked.

Over the next few years, I would spend nearly every waking moment learning new ways to make money on the Internet. Looking back, I?m surprised that Bryna supported me so well, since that meant she spent a lot of time watching TV or reading while I was working on the computer.

Back then, not a lot of people knew how important getting to the top of the search engines was, and I focused most of my time on becoming the best I could at it. I was able to attract visitors from search engines and send them to other companies for a commission. I was making more than double what both of my parents combined were making. I had enough money to move to my own place. I was working from home, making great money, in my underwear, choosing my own hours, and I was my own boss. What else could I possibly want?

I got bored of it pretty quickly. I wanted to do more. I wanted a physical product to sell. I wanted to have a real company, with employees, customers, warehouses, offices, and more. I wanted to "go to work" and build something that would be important. I wanted something real and lasting.

This was the point when creatine started to get popular. EAS came out with their Phosphagen creatine product and it became the top selling muscle building product at places like GNC. It was safe and effective, and Bill Phillips from EAS promoted it to the world through his Body-For-Life program. The only problem was that it was extremely expensive. A 1000 gram bottle was around $120!

I joined up with a bodybuilding friend and started contacting creatine manufacturers. We realized we could buy it at wholesale and sell it for only $79, directly to the consumer. That's when our site, wholesale-creatine.com, first went online.

What happened next blew my mind and I made a life decision that most people called insane...

PTII

PART TWO

In 1997, I had just started the wholesale-creatine.com web site, selling pure creatine directly to the consumer over the Internet at extremely low prices. I had created a small web site that featured a lot of information on what creatine is, how to use it, what to expect from it, and more. It had a very basic shopping cart that I created myself (it was really just a one page order form). I created a very basic affiliate program that manually tracked which web sites referred customers.

At first, customers had to send their orders to me by snail mail to my PO Box since I could not accept credit cards.

After launching the site, I spent most of my time creating pages that could get listed in the search engines. I used my search engine optimization techniques to try to get my sites listed at the top for keywords like "creatine" and "muscle building".

For the first month? nothing happened. Not one order. I would rush to the post office to check my PO Box each day. My heart would race right before I opened the box to see how many orders were stuffed in there. Each day only an empty hole greeted me. Not one single order? It didn?t even make sense. I was very frustrated. Luckily, I still had money coming in from my other businesses. I had them running on auto-pilot at that point (I love the Internet).

I took a trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico with my family, and it was a nice break that lasted a full week. For the first time in a long time, I didn?t work at all. I asked Bryna to marry me on this trip. We were on the beach on a warm evening, and luckily, she said yes.

When I got back, I decided I might as well check my PO Box for any creatine orders. It's funny how things happen when you least expect it. I inserted my small gold key into the PO Box door and swung it open. What greeted me was more exciting than finding a secret hole in the girl's locker room shower wall.

The PO Box was stuffed with so many orders that I had to get the rest from the front desk clerk. I had at least 50 orders, each for $79 from customers all over the country. That's $3950 in sales, and it seemed like a million to me. My cost was around $30 per bottle, so that meant a profit of $2450. That was great, but the idea that this could grow and continue for years meant I was really on to something.

At that point, I made a decision to stop working on any of my other businesses. I was making $20,000 per month from home at 20 years old with little effort and minimal hassles, and I gave it all up to start selling supplements online.

This was when the hassles really started. Now that we had orders, we had to ship them out. Now that we had customers, we had to answer the phone when they called. We had to deal with returns, inventory, order processing, purchasing, and more, all from my small garage in West Boise. I didn?t have any experience with any of this. We had to figure it out all from scratch. Now you know why my hair started turning gray when I was in my early twenties!

At this point, my brother Jeremy came over to my house each day to work with me. Each day we checked our web site for orders (we eventually were approved for accepting credit cards), entered the orders into Quickbooks, printed them out, put Higher Power labels on our generic creatine bottles, pack the orders, put them into my 1998 Chevy Blazer, and take them to the local post office.

My friends were in college, partying it up and wondering why I was so stupid to want to spend my time working and reading. But I loved every minute of it.

Selling creatine was great, but I still wanted something more. Next I would buy something more valuable than pure gold. It is a something that you can't touch, hear, smell, or taste, but people ask me at least once a week about how I got it. Stay tuned for part three...

Part Three Is Down Below!

PTIII

PART THREE

It was 1998 (two years before the end of the world), and business was going great. We were selling more and more creatine monohydrate through our small web site, shipping it right out of my garage. We piled the creatine bottles high in my garage, using my old jet-ski as a shelf, and Jeremy would come over each day to help me ship them out. It was a very manual process, but we handled it. Our goal from the beginning was to ship our products out extremely quickly in order to get repeat business.

Soon we added another product, androstenedione, which was quickly becoming a popular prohormone supplement after home run king Mark McGuire announced he was using it. It was a new and legal product which gave people quick muscle building and strength results. We bought the domain androstenedione.com and started ordering 60 capsule bottles from our manufacturer.

This definitely helped increase sales, but we still knew we couldn't grow as big as we wanted with only two products on a couple of simple web sites.

One day while dreaming big, I noticed that the Bodybuilding.com domain name was not being used. A guy in California owned it, but he was not using it. I contacted him and asked him about selling it. Immediately, he responded and said that he would not sell it because he had big plans for using it. I was disappointed, but went on with my day.

A few months later, I noticed the domain was still not being used. What a waste! I contacted the owner again and asked him to reconsider. This time he wrote back saying that he was busy with his current business and may never be able to get around to using the name. He might be interested in selling it at the right price. Great! Now we could see if we could get a deal done.

At this point, I couldn't think about anything else! I would go to Barnes And Noble and study business books, and each day I was thinking of more and more great ways to build a business that was not just about selling supplements, but being a place where people could learn, interact, and reach their fitness goals.

I had started bodybuilding in junior high, and ever since then it was a major part of my life. I would read every magazine, idolize the pros, buy supplements and drinks from GNC, and buy books about how to get big and ripped. I loved everything to do with bodybuilding. I first started working out at home after school was out at Fairmont, then I moved to Valley Gym where I worked out before AND after school nearly every day.

When I first heard of the Internet, I searched for sites and bulletin boards about bodybuilding. I found some small sites and communities, and I joined a few mailing lists. I couldn?t believe how awesome this was! I was used to just reading the muscle magazines and talking to one or two of my friends that cared about working out, but now I could learn from thousands of people from around the world. I would spend hours online just surfing bodybuilding sites. It was a like a dream come true, even though at that point there wasn't a lot out there compared to what was possible.

The idea of being able to use the Bodybuilding.com domain name to build the site that I personally would have wanted as a visitor was very exciting. I couldn?t stop thinking of all the things we could do.

I continued to email the Bodybuilding.com name owner back and forth for weeks, trying to reach a deal that was acceptable to both of us. He had told me that at the same time a business owner in Japan was trying to buy it as well. After many rounds of negotiations, I finally offered $20,000 cash for it.

A few days went by without a response. I would sit and check my e-mail every two minutes, praying for a positive response, dreading being turned down, and just wanting an answer so I could stop stressing out!

On one fateful Fall day, I clicked the "Check Email" button for the one hundredth time so far that morning. A new message was coming through! I was sitting in my small home office with my two dogs laying by my side, patiently waiting for me to get up and take them for a walk. Bryna was at the gym, so I was alone, sitting in my old Office Max chair, in my underwear like usual. The message appeared in my Juno e-mail program. My heart stopped beating and I held my breath, involuntarily, as a I read the first five words.

"DEAL. It's yours for $20,000."

I couldn't believe it! I started jumping up and down, running around my house in my underwear screaming. My dogs had no idea why I was acting like a Price Is Right contestant that just heard that it was their turn to "come on down"! They were barking and jumping around, following me around as I did my best not to kick them with each spastic jump. I felt like I had won the lottery and found a Willy Wonka Golden Ticket at the same time!

It was mine.

Now it was up to me to do something with it.

I hired my cousin-in-law Travis Smith to come help me start building the first version of the site since he knew how to write HTML. After many late nights brainstorming at Shari's diner, trying to find more products to sell than just our Higher Power line, and creating web pages, the site was ready to go live on April 13th, 1999.

On that day, we removed the "coming soon" page and put up the real site with a few clicks. I refreshed the http://www.bodybuilding.com site and there it was, Bodybuilding.com 1.0, looking back at my from my CRT computer screen.

I couldn?t sleep that first night. I woke up that morning in my 1980?s style water bed, struggled to get out of bed since my dogs were practically laying on top of my head, and stumbled to the computer to see if we had any orders.

We did! But it wasn't what I expected?

PT IV

PART FOUR

Imagine being strapped into an old wooden roller coaster with a blind fold on.

At first the ride starts out deceptively slow, climbing the first huge hill... "click, clank, click clank, click clank"... moving up, up, up for what seems like forever. Eventually, you reach the top and the clicking sounds stop and the silence is deafening.

Then it's a freefall into the unknown. All you can do is hold on tight to the rickety handle in front of you and hope that you don't get thrown out like a crash test dummy in a 1979 Ford Pinto.

In my life, I had reached that exact point. I was strapped in and had no idea what was in store next, but I was ready to take it on, head first, with nostrils flaring.

April 14th, 1999 was a Wednesday, and Bodybuilding.com had been open for one night. It was the next step in my journey that would eventually teach me more about the world, business, and myself than anything else. It would either bankrupt me at the age of 21 or make me a multi-millionaire. I would not accept anything in the middle.

That first morning I groggily went to my computer to check if we had any orders. We knew that the Bodybuilding.com domain was already getting 500 visitors per day from people typing "bodybuilding.com" into their browsers to see what was there, so we knew we had a good chance to have some orders on the first day.

I typed in the URL to get into our shopping cart admin area. The first message that greeted me was "New Orders Available". Sweet! I clicked the message to see how many we had.

To my disappointment, we only had one. I don't know why, but I naively hoped we would have at least 100 the first day. I know now that with our limited product selection, bare bones site, and low traffic levels, that was extremely unrealistic, but back then I had no idea what to expect. I've always been an optimist.

I clicked to view our first order, and immediately recognized the signs of fraud. This wasn't a real order. It was some thief in Nigeria using a stolen credit card. So in reality, we didn't have any orders at all.

I hid my disappointment when I broke the news to my brother Jeremy and my cousin Travis. It was okay. It was only the first day and we have a lot of work to do to build it up, one day and one web page at a time.

Over the next few days, weeks, and months we added more and more content and products to the web site. Those days were spent furiously writing articles, adding new features like message boards and chat to our site, filling orders in my garage, ordering supplies, answering customer e-mails and phone calls, and marketing our site all over the Internet using free methods like link trading, search engine optimization and more.

Slowly but surely, we started to get some orders. At first, it was just one or two a day, but would slowly and consistently grow, like a snowball rolling downhill. We would celebrate our first "10 order" day, then 20, then 30 and on and on.

Every month brought a new milestone, along with the pressure to keep up. That pressure has not stopped to this day. As I write this on February 26th, 2008, I'm happy to report that we just had a record order day yesterday with 4356 orders. I know this is just the beginning of what is possible.

To get from 10 orders per day to where we are now had many ups and downs, sleepless nights, fights with family and friends, big celebrations and big letdowns, lost friendships, lawsuits, fear of losing it all, a failed attempt to sell part of our business, and much more which I'll detail in the coming chapters.

One moment in our history I will never forget.

I was working in one of our first real offices outside of my house a year after we started Bodybuilding.com, when I saw five police cars pull up out front. Our warehouse was in the "meth lab" part of the city (hey, the rent was cheap), so I figured they were busting somebody in the trailer park next door.

Imagine my surprise when federal agents wearing bullet-proof vests busted into our office with their police dogs, demanding that we stop working and stay off the phones. Ten minutes of shock and fear went by as they secured the entire building and brought all of our employees into one area. What was going on? Was there some type of misunderstanding or did we do something illegal without knowing it? Was I going to jail?

Stay tuned for part five...

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=7224141&page=2

[240 is Back]

I guess you can read whatever you want into it...you know, like you do everything else.

I thought we had progressed past this point, where you're calling me insulting terms on message boards.  It seems I was mistaken.  Have a nice day, Bob.

[michael arvilla]

Lemmings are small rodents, usually found in or near the Arctic, in tundra biomes. Together with the voles and muskrats, they make up the subfamily Arvicolinae (also known as Microtinae), which forms part of the largest mammal radiation by far, the superfamily Muroidea, which also includes the rats, mice, hamsters, and gerbils.

[G o a t b o y]

Lemmings are small rodents

Bob!  Are you calling 240 a rodent? 

[Chick]

I thought we had progressed past this point, where you're calling me insulting terms on message boards.  It seems I was mistaken.  Have a nice day, Bob.

You can thank your buddy Goatboy for bringing it back up....

You want to make things right? Then you can tell the TRUTH about the incident...

[G o a t b o y]

You can thank your buddy Goatboy for bringing it back up....

You want to make things right? Then you can tell the TRUTH about the incident...

Seems to me the only factual dispute here is the exact wording of what you said, whether it was "I can find out if you ordered from bb.com", or if you implied that you had access to customer records.  Since the original posts aren't all on the board anymore, unless 240 still has his copy saved this is destined to become a 20-page thread of "no I didn't" "yes you did". 

[michael arvilla]

colˇleague (klg)
n.
A fellow member of a profession, staff, or academic faculty; an associate. See Synonyms at partner.