But did Amazon out-compete due to VC funding or due to a recognition that the fundamental nature of what a book store is was about to change.

Could an early-stage bootstrapped business even take advantage of the latter?

In Amazon's case? I doubt it. The costs associated with starting and scaling a business like Amazon are just too high to bootstrap effectively. But a SaaS company or software product company (i.e. change "bookstore" to something else)? Absolutely.

Amazon was started in a bootstrapish way with about $200k from Bezos, his parent and loans. The code was written in C by Bezos and two other guys in his garage. Once they launched they had to raise money to scale though.

$200k is not bootstrapping. That's still a great amount for a seed round in most places in the world.

$200k CAN BE bootsrapping. Bootstrapping is running your business with personal funds and not receiving or accepting external money.

By this definition Bezos was not bootstrapped.

You're right. There should be a another terms for it though because 200k is 200k if you put it in yourself or took it from a VC. The last company I started we had €20 starting capital which we spent on a domain name and a server. Clearly there is a huge difference between those 2 cases as we had to be profitable from day 1.

I agree. Bootstrapping has come to connote "small sums" as opposed to self-funding.

Interestingly, TV ads are starting to show up for some of these brands. We have a Leesa foam mattress and like it quite a bit and my wife was just mentioning this week she was seeing TV ads for them (not sure the channel).

Spring / traditional mattresses are a bit of a challenge (size), but foam mattresses can be packed up relatively conveniently (Leesa was 2x2x4.5 for a queen) and shipped w/ a decent 90ish day try/return policy.

Different than the days of going to a mattress dealer and having the same manufacturer give different names to the mattress based on dealer so "price comparison" was difficult/impossible.