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).