I would love to start a new discussion on bootstrapped (non-venture backed) startup experiences focused on the consumer web space. Wins and Fails are both welcome!
He started a blog/website about mobile app reviews in 2008 in France, grew the traffic organically to something like 150K UV/month after one year, was making some money with affiliate (iTunes) and advertising - 3-5K/month basically. Then he started building apps and wanted to promote them using his blog. He built a few and realized that his blog was not enough to promote it, and heard about FreeAppADay. He decided to start a FreeAppADay equivalent in France first through a newsletter, then through a mobile app.
Now, their app is installed by 25% of iPhone owners in France, Spain, and it is catching up in many other countries as well in Europe and South America... and the Company is selling premium placements to brands, publishers and app developers who get tons of downloads thanks to them...They will make multiple millions of dollars in revenues this year!
I think it is much easier to bootstrap a consumer play when the core is content and community (vs. engineering).
Really interesting story and thanks for sharing! It sounds like quite a journey for him to go from a review blog to become a meaningful marketing channel. Respect!
If you don't mind something that has neither Won nor Failed yet, here goes:
http://GetLocalNe.ws (my self-funded startup).
Launched about 10 months ago. Have been at it since then (using a goodish number of people I employ), pumping in cash/time/effort etc.
Still working largely on back-end, but it seems to be gaining at least a small (and growing) user base slowly. Started averaging 5k unique visitors/day since the beginning of this year/month.
Will keep at it through 2012. :)
Its kinda topical what you are trying to do. If you see the Summify exit and the News.me uptake afterwards, it seems you are in a hotish space.
I would think that your landing page needs a UX/IA review. The onboarding process should be super easy in this case and instead of giving me a form to start with, you would be better off pre-loading relevant/contextual content.
Hope that makes sense.
ps - I hope you didn't mind my $0.02
Would love to get some discussion going here.