Care to elaborate? Whether or not you have a professionally designed logo would make an interesting A/B test. Have you done or are you aware of any research about this?
I think my use of the word logo in my comment contributed to the problem instead of a solution. Specifically, if you think of branding in terms of firing up Photoshop and trying out some cool fonts, then you are not seeing the big picture.
The specific reason that this thread has tweaked me so much is that it's just so typical for us developers to minimize the effort that goes into good design. It's like it's somehow incomprensible that a team of people with years of experience would spend weeks coming up with a brand strategy that works well across many mediums and tells a coherent story.
There's a really good article about the process of creating the FedEx logo on HN right now. He wasn't starting from scratch or doing a style guide and it still sounds like it took months.
But right now the guy is bootstrapping. He doesn't have money for brand design. He shouldn't even be worried about brand design. Having a decent looking logo so he looks professional to the 99.999999% of us who aren't brand designers is the key. Doing it at as low a cost as possible is important. This may tweak you and other brand designers out there, but the reality is he doesn't need anything more than eye candy right now.
Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/) is a decent open source vector graphics editor that you should be able to use to whip up something halfway decent.
The issue you can have if you go with a really cheap logo is that it may be just a rip off of some other logo, and you may run into trademark issues.