I've been designing for over 12 years. I've designed many consumer app used by millions of people. I've done a lot of cool projects in my career. I've worked for fortune 500 companies as well as start-ups and notable unicorn companies. I've also spent an early part of my career in the agency world. I worked both full time and contractually. More recently over the past couple of years I did very well working remotely for some clients as a sole contractor.

I enjoy designing. I've observed earlier in my career how these guys start their own agencies and then turn around and sell them for millions. Been through 4 acquisitionsin in my career, two of which were with agencies. While I didn't get anything out of them I always thought if they can do this why can't I?

I've toyed with the idea of starting my own agency, but always second guessed doing it because I felt the markets were too saturated for another agency to get thrown into the mix. However, I've see the success of them, but really don't know where to start. I have a old boss who wants to do this too and we've thrown around ideas, but the struggle I found was how to generate leads? A lot of people talk about bringing in revenue and what not, but I figured a lot of places have their own in house design and development team so why spend money on a agency.

Where do I begin if I want to do this? How do I generate leads? Really want to work for myself and try to build something successful even if it's 2-3 clients- it's something.

My gut tells me to target start-ups they have some good capital and I've had success with then personally, but then I read people posting on Facebook as lead generation too. So not sure.

Any advice on how to start?

What are some of everyone's recommended branding agencies for startups?