It IS dismissive and minimizing to pay slave wages to a professional designer. But, most of those $5 logos aren’t professional designers. They are people adding text to stock photos. Most of them are hideous.

You hit the nail on the head when you said “for a quickly growing company’ — most of the people buying $5 logos don’t have quickly growing companies, and they’re not your ideal client.

And I won’t even get INTO the people who sell cheap websites because designers are also a “ripoff” — that kind of attitude is almost everywhere. And I say almost because of where it’s not — it’s not in the language that successful business owners use. People who know how to grow a company know what’s worth paying for. Those are the people we both want to work with. :)