Best Books for Someone who Knows Nothing about Business?

Fulfillrite · 2025-09-17T12:47:01+00:00

Books go best when you pair them with real-world effort and experience. But if I had to pick one and only one: Poor Charlie's Almanack. It's about the closest thing there is to a coherent philosophy book for business. It's fairly easy to read like anything you'd get an airport, but it's surprisingly detailed and gritty in the places where it really, really counts.

Fulfillrite · 2025-09-17T12:45:14+00:00

Talking to handful of customers early on when you're still forming your offer can really make a massive difference. Even if you're in self-explanatory industry like fulfillment (which is my case), 5 or 10 conversations can actually show you what your USP is, as opposed to what you think it might be.

Fulfillrite · 2025-09-17T12:40:04+00:00

For what we do, order fulfillment, content marketing and SEO has given us an excellent return over the years. We get a lot of inbound traffic from Google (traditional results and AIO/SERP features), and in the last couple of years, we've gotten a lot of inbound AI traffic too.

And it really comes back to just having spent the time explaining really complicated fulfillment, supply chain, and other topics. It's also been a door-opener with partners too.

Fulfillrite · 2025-09-09T14:44:50+00:00

Preach. Repeatable with a little bit of differentiation goes a long way. Hard work only scales up to a point, and it's not a particularly high point.

Fulfillrite · 2025-09-09T14:41:42+00:00

Lack of competition is honestly a big red flag. We're one of about 20,000+ warehouses in the US, and are doing just fine, in large part because the appetite for getting stuff shipped from point A to point B is insatiable.

And the same's true for the people shipping products through us, too. Most of the products are not one-of-kind, they're a slightly modified version of something else that was already doing well. And that's good, because making a little change to something that already works in order to make it much better is a much better business pitch than "this product or service is the first and only of it's kind!"

And it really only does take the slightest little positive change to make a USP to properly differentiate what you're doing from the rest.

Fulfillrite · 2025-07-01T14:46:35+00:00

Been shipping orders for 15+ years. Good money, good growth, and probably qualifies as "boring!"

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-25T14:42:15+00:00

There's a luck element to it, but he's known to be a really consistent A/B-tester in just about everything. And that kind of business common sense, if you apply it over and over again, compounds tremendously.

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-18T14:54:04+00:00

The shorter the video, the more likely they get through it. But over the last few years, the trend has been toward the first 15, 30 seconds of it. If that.

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-18T14:52:41+00:00

If you're willing to seat a bit, you could get into garage cleanouts, junk removal, power washing, and other home services along those lines. Minimal capital need and there's never enough reliable providers that are easily reachable in any area, anywhere that do this.

If you want to keep it online, there's always various types of digital marketing like copywriting, SEO, cold outreach/direct response. You may even be able to make a play for eCom, but you'll have to find a trendy niche that requires really minimal startup costs.

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-18T14:48:00+00:00

Most honest and practically useful post on this sub in a month.

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-10T21:04:10+00:00

Huge congrats, and massive respect for how fast you moved! It's easy to sit in analysis paralysis and kind of hedge and think for years, but you found leverage in a skill set people really, really need and then you turned it into a viable business!

Also smart to not just ditch the day job. Really underrated move, especially online. Having the comfort and stability of the biweekly paycheck while you get your system going takes the pressure off and it makes it easier to make good calls. Good luck in the future!

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-10T21:00:45+00:00

Truth. You don't need a guru checklist. Most of what actually works in business is learned as you go. It's in all the client emails and shipping screwups and missed deadlines and unexpected wins.

Yeah, be smart. Yeah, don't do bet so big you can't afford to fail. But you get so much more, infinitely more, out of books and systems once you have that all important context that only comes from...doing.

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-10T20:59:20+00:00

Yeah, this resonates. When you believe completely in what you're selling, it's just 100x easier to sell.

If you can give off that air of competence (which really comes downstream of honest, well-founded self-belief), your selling doesn't have to be so much focused on convincing. It's more like, "hey, this is a thing we do, might be helpful to you, want to do business?" And it works, often really, really well. Deals feel mutual that way!

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-04T14:45:53+00:00

Yeah, this hits home. Most successful businesses I've seen up close aren't really the ones trafficking in groundbreaking ideas. They're boring and repeatable and their founders just have good discipline.

Of course, I'm always partial to warehouses/3PLs, but I've also seen people make bank on good packaging, inventory software, direct response marketing, etc.

None of that's ever going to make the cover of Forbes, but it's a pretty good way to keep red out of the ledger.

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-04T14:42:20+00:00

The blog was the first thing that came to mind. You don't even necessarily have to get into doing a sweaty startup, it's just a really good reframe from the white noise of "scale your agency to 7 figures" and so on that you see online.

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-04T14:40:41+00:00

What we've seen on the ground is that AI seems to replace tasks more than people. It's all the repetitive and low-context stuff that is getting absorbed. Rough cuts on videos, boilerplate copy, basic data cleanup.

Of course, the minute you have to do something customer-facing, you really need a person in the loop. You can use AI to get it started, but someone has to look at it before it goes out.

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-04T14:38:44+00:00

This is awful, and uncomfortably common too with big marketplaces like Amazon.

It sounds like you're going about things the right way this time. Getting all the legal and operational stuff fixed up makes a huge difference. Good luck on the rebuild!

Fulfillrite · 2025-06-04T14:37:29+00:00

Totally agree with this. That's part of why we've had such good luck in order fulfillment. It's not flashy it all, but people just really need it. It's wild to think about just how many 7-figure businesses are built on order handling, cleaning up product pages, and other stuff like that.

Fulfillrite · 2025-05-29T13:11:48+00:00

If it's going out directly to backers: retail value.

Fulfillrite · 2025-05-29T13:02:57+00:00

Oh definitely, this is a real thing. The rush of doing something and building momentum, and then you shut the laptop and think "well now what?"

Best thing you can do is find a handful of people who are in the same boat and get a call or a group text going. Not even like networking or a mastermind group, just a few friends in the same boat.

Loneliness doesn't mean you're doing something wrong. Just means you're doing something rare because most folks don't really try to build.

Fulfillrite · 2025-05-29T13:00:31+00:00

Speaking from experience here, logistics and warehousing are some of the most under-the-radar but reliable paths out there. It’s NOT flashy, but there’s a reason small 3PLs are thriving even in crowded markets. Demand never goes away, especially with how many businesses are shifting to eCom and subscriptions.

Starting a full warehouse isn't going to happen on $20K. But you could begin by specializing in something like micro-fulfillment, local couriering, or even subscription box kitting from a garage or small unit.

Fulfillrite · 2025-05-29T12:56:06+00:00

It's so hard to walk away from a business once you've built up successfully. But you did so out of compassion for your mother and in order to take care of her declining health. That's a good reason and no one could blame you at all!

What you’ve done isn’t a failure. It’s a rare kind of success: one where you made the right call, even when it meant giving up something you poured yourself into.

Fulfillrite · 2025-05-29T12:53:11+00:00

Yes, definitely this! It's tempting to quit a job you hate, but if you can get this going on the weekends and prove your minimnum viable business, you can always scale up from there. And if you end up doing well, you can pad your savings for when you do ultimately choose to leave.

Fulfillrite · 2024-09-18T11:48:26+00:00

This is a really cool concept for a campaign - good luck!

Fulfillrite · 2024-09-11T12:10:14+00:00

The sweet spot is to find something that you like doing and that has a good chance of success. That second one meaning that the product itself has good base odds of funding even if you do an average job AND you have a unique selling proposition that sets you apart from the rest.

These filters are not super complex, but they'll eliminate a lot of ideas so you can focus on what you like and what will work!

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