7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $300K ACV Platform in Construction Tech

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building a $300K ACV Platform in Construction Tech

When Marc Minor spent $20,000 trying to figure out what he could build on a piece of land in North Carolina, he didn’t just discover a business opportunity. He uncovered a go-to-market playbook that inverts almost everything conventional SaaS wisdom teaches.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Marc Minor, CEO and Co-Founder of Higharc, shared how building a home building cloud platform requires rejecting PLG motions, embracing technical complexity as strategy, and selling to an industry where buyers still use Earthlink email addresses. For B2B founders tackling traditional industries, these lessons matter.

Lesson 1: Recruit for Capability Gaps, Not Chemistry

The co-founder matching advice you read everywhere is wrong—at least for deep tech plays. Marc recruited three co-founders he’d never met before. Not friends from college. Not former coworkers. Strangers with specific, rare technical capabilities.

“I actually went out and recruited each of them based on sort of what I thought we needed in the business,” Marc explains. The company needed to build a web-based CAD system to replace 41-year-old AutoCAD software. That required someone who understood parametric CAD systems and could build them on the web—two skills that rarely exist together.

Six years later, all three co-founders remain at the company. The principle: when you’re solving a genuinely hard technical problem, optimize for capability first. Chemistry can develop. Missing technical expertise cannot be learned fast enough.

Lesson 2: Use Technical Complexity as Your Wedge

Most vertical SaaS companies verticalize horizontal tools. Higharc did the opposite. They built fundamentally new software that only works in their industry, creating a proprietary dataset competitors can’t replicate.

“We didn’t approach the problem from a let’s leverage pre existing tools and techniques and just verticalize them,” Marc says. “We actually took a different route of building software that’s fundamentally unique to the industry with this computer aided design software, and that creates this kind of unique dataset that only we can maintain.”

The comparison Marc makes is instructive: Toast and Square used point-of-sale as their wedge into restaurants and retail. Higharc uses CAD. It’s harder to build and takes longer, but it becomes the foundation for expansion into estimation, 3D sales configurators, and blueprint production. The lesson: in crowded markets, technical moats beat feature parity.

Lesson 3: Match Your Go-to-Market to Your Buyer’s Reality

Selling $300,000 ACV software to homebuilders requires abandoning the standard enterprise SaaS playbook. These buyers don’t behave like tech companies. “They’re very boots on the ground type people, type companies,” Marc notes. Many prospects still use Earthlink email addresses.

Traditional tactics failed spectacularly. Cold outbound sequences didn’t work. LinkedIn ads generated no results. The industry doesn’t engage with software the way tech buyers do. What worked was hyper-personalized ABM: taking prospects’ actual floor plans from their websites, importing them into Higharc, creating personalized landing pages showing what their homes would look like in the platform.

Physical video mailers with built-in screens playing case studies also generated deals at $30-50 per unit. The lesson isn’t about specific tactics. It’s about matching distribution strategy to how your buyers actually discover and evaluate solutions, not how you wish they would.

Lesson 4: Distribution Through Trust Networks Beats Paid Acquisition

In industries where everyone knows each other, traditional demand gen doesn’t work. Marc recognized homebuilding operates as a trust network. “Home building is quite local. Everyone kind of knows each other,” he says. “If you think of home building in the US as a kind of network graph and there are these nodes of trust, you know, we want to tap those nodes of trust and then leverage success with those nodes to reach the other parts of the market.”

This required massive investment in implementation and support. Marketing’s job became sales enablement—giving prospects reasons to take meetings, not driving pipeline through ads. It’s slower than PLG, but in traditional industries with high switching costs, successful customer references outperform every other channel.

Lesson 5: Don’t Build Marketing Until You Have Product-Market Fit

Higharc didn’t hire a marketing team for years. Marc’s philosophy: “I don’t believe you should build a marketing team until you have really strong product market fit. The Founder, the founding team needs to be doing that work.”

When they did hire, mistakes happened bringing in talented senior ICs working on things they didn’t want to do. The breakthrough came from recruiting a former colleague as VP of Marketing.

Early-stage marketing in enterprise sales is fundamentally sales enablement. Product demos, case studies, and customer success stories matter more than demand gen infrastructure.

Lesson 6: Silicon Valley Networks Still Matter for Hard Tech

Marc is brutally honest about something most remote-first founders won’t admit: “There’s no chance that I would’ve built this company if I hadn’t already worked in the valley, had some startup successes, and then networked in, I would give it exactly 0% chance of it happening.”

Higharc operates remotely with 100 people across the US and Brazil. Remote work unlocked talent access. But the capital, the investor relationships, and the pattern recognition all came from prior Valley experience. The lesson: remote operations are viable. Remote founding without Valley network access remains extremely difficult for capital-intensive deep tech.

Lesson 7: Avoid the Vitamin Trap

When asked about creating demand, Marc’s response cuts through typical marketing advice: “I don’t think you ever want to be in a position where you have to drum up demand, like you don’t want to be a vitamin.”

Higharc benefits from existing pain around disconnected homebuilding processes. The challenge isn’t creating awareness of the problem. It’s building confidence they can solve it. This inverts the typical marketing funnel. Top-of-funnel isn’t about problem education. It’s about credibility demonstration through successful customer references and product personalization.

The lesson: if you’re spending significant resources educating prospects about whether they have a problem, you might be solving the wrong problem. The best GTM strategies start with markets experiencing acute pain and focus energy on proving you can solve it.

The Patient Approach

These lessons share a common thread: they require patience. Building hard technology takes longer. Distribution through trust networks scales slower. Waiting for product-market fit before scaling marketing delays growth.

But Marc’s bet is that patient GTM strategies create defensibility fast-scaling approaches cannot. Technical moats, proprietary datasets, and trust-based distribution are harder for competitors to replicate than paid acquisition playbooks.