How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
How much investment money and customer volume do I need to make that business viable?
> How do I start a fulfillment business that can get a roll of toilet paper delivered to the doorstep of consumers nationwide inside of 24 hours and have that transaction be profitable?
As with all successful businesses, you start small.
You figure out what's your edge. You are resourceful.
You don't compete with ANY competitor by trying to do 100% what they do out of the gate.
Pro-tip: selling (rather than producing) toilet paper is probably never a big business anyhow.
Fulfillment business is very hard. Amazon has invested well into the hundreds of billions building it out, and that's supported by their economy of scale of Amazon.com. A fulfillment business for toilet paper would never pencil out profitably no matter how hard you try.
This is actually a great example of the consumer winning out due to Amazon's business. Pre-Amazon, 24 hour shipping was literally not a thing, even 2 day shipping, especially for free, was a major innovation of the site.
So for fulfillment for general goods, I do think this is something that you will never be able to compete with Amazon on as a small player profitably. However, there is plenty of competition in specific verticals, such as Instacart or Doordash for groceries specifically. And if you want to be a toilet paper producer/seller, that is possible too (just not the fulfillment part but again I'm not sure why we expect "toilet paper fulfillment" to be a valid category that needs to be a thing), for example I bought my phone case from Dbrand due to the strength of their product and marketing. As a small player you need to compete on specific verticals but that has always been the case. Amazon was originally a book seller.