How Much Does It Cost To Start A Branding Agency? (In 2024)

"I started the business with the offer of branding and website design. I offered some free sessions and low-priced services in the beginning in order to build my portfolio."

Elva Li is the founder of ELVA LI Brand.Style.Design, a boutique branding house that specializes in luxury branding and website design for female entrepreneurs.

"Luckily, we didn’t have to finance anything for this business as we are a service business... This allowed us to not have to put any money into the business - well except for a few hundred dollars for our website."

Mimi and her husband Delaney are the founders of Above 8000 Creative, a creative agency that started in 2017 offering services in graphic design, website design, photography, content creation, and Instagram marketing.

"I got started with about $65 in my bank account... I had spent about $40 of the $65 I had to jump-start my business - the initial capital."

Teju is the founder of Branperience, a full-service brand experience firm that started in 2018 and has seen a yearly revenue increase of 22-37%.

"Within two weeks of buying the domain vixelstudio.com... Purchased a course for $500.00."

Munir is the founder of Vixel Studio, a Web Design and SEO Company in Ottawa that has quickly scaled to manage over 50 clients and generate significant monthly revenue.

"To create a company is a bit more expensive. There are lawyers' costs, and you need a minimal amount of financial assets, but having a digital service business that I already started as a contractor, these were easy to manage."

Dávid Pásztor is the founder of UX studio, a user experience design agency based in Budapest, Hungary, that provides a wide variety of UX-related services to clients worldwide.

"For me the biggest challenge was start-up capital. I had just finished studying photography and basically, I did not have any. Fortunately, I had acquired the equipment needed during my time in school and I started working with a real estate photography company called Open Homes Photography. The market was hot, and I shot about 140 homes that summer."

Catherine Nguyen is the founder of Catherine Nguyen Photography, a Raleigh-based advertising and editorial photography business specializing in residential and commercial interior design and architecture.

"Starting this business with just $6,000 from my savings was a risk. Fortunately, the ongoing costs were minimal; initial hosting was under $100 per month, and other expenses totaled at most $500."

Spence Patterson is the founder of a SaaS paywall platform for content creators, launched in 2019, and which grew to generate between $125,000 - $142,000 in Monthly Recurring Revenue.

"In terms of finance, in the beginning, I was very resourceful. As I mentioned earlier I had a three-year-old and a newborn and we were going backwards financially fast. So there was no startup capital to speak of. I simply did a lot of hard work, and any time I made a profit, we reinvested it all back into the business. In the early days, I took no wage, later I took a small wage, and it was probably around nine years into the business and two years after Kat and I became 50/50 shares in the business that we both finally started to pay ourselves the sort of wage we could command if we went out into the workforce."

Yvette Adams is the founder of The Creative Collective, a full-service marketing agency that started in 2007 and has since experienced significant growth and revenue increases.

"So the overall cost to setup was something like: Domain ($10) + Landing Page (Made our own) + Contact Form + 2checkout ($0 setup fees) + Tawkto (Free) + Hosting ($15) + G-suite Email ($10) and we were ready with our MVP product."

Junaid Ansari is the co-founder of Draftss, a productized graphic design and frontend code service.

"The money we earned from Bop Design went right back into the business to pay for marketing, networking events, and other business expenses. We lived off my salary and Jeremy's sales consulting job."

Kara Jensen is the co-founder of Bop Design, a B2B Digital Marketing Agency that she started in 2009, which has since evolved to serve clients globally and made the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list two years in a row.