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How Higharc Turned CAD Into a $300K ACV Wedge Strategy

Spending $20,000 just to figure out what you can build on a piece of land sounds insane. But that’s exactly what happened to Marc Minor when he tried to build a house in North Carolina. The experience was so painful that it became the foundation for an entirely new category.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Marc Minor, CEO and Co-Founder of Higharc, shared how he’s applying digital manufacturing principles to an industry that still runs on 41-year-old software. But the real story isn’t about the technology. It’s about how he built a go-to-market engine that turns a hard technical problem into a defensible moat.

Building a Team of Strangers

Most founding stories start with roommates or former coworkers. Marc’s started with LinkedIn searches and cold recruiting. After raising capital from Pillar VC, he brought on three co-founders he’d never met before.

“I actually went out and recruited each of them based on sort of what I thought we needed in the business,” Marc explains. The team needed to build a CAD system on the web, something only a handful of people in the world can do effectively. Peter Boyer came from Autodesk with web-based parametric CAD expertise. Michael Bergen brought generative design experience from Autodesk’s Office of the CTO. Thomas came from AAA video gaming with procedurally generated content capabilities.

Six years later, all three remain at the company. The lesson isn’t about hiring strangers—it’s about being ruthlessly specific about capability gaps.

CAD as Category Wedge

Here’s where Higharc’s GTM strategy diverges from typical vertical SaaS playbooks. Most vertical SaaS companies start by verticalizing horizontal tools like project management or accounting. Higharc went the opposite direction, building fundamentally new software specific to homebuilding.

“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 telling: Toast and Square used point-of-sale as their wedge. Higharc uses CAD. It’s harder to build and takes longer, but it creates a proprietary dataset that becomes the foundation for expansion. Nobody has data about houses the way Higharc does. That data becomes the platform for additional services, from estimation to 3D sales configurators to blueprint production.

This is the roll-up strategy reimagined. Instead of stitching together point solutions, they’re building outward from a defensible core that competitors can’t easily replicate.

Enterprise SaaS in a Boots-on-the-Ground Industry

Selling $300,000 ACV software to homebuilders requires a completely different playbook than selling to tech companies. Homebuilders don’t behave like typical enterprise buyers. “They’re very boots on the ground type people, type companies,” Marc notes. Many still use Earthlink email addresses.

Cold outbound sequences? They don’t work. LinkedIn ads? Ineffective. Traditional demand gen tactics failed because the audience doesn’t engage with software the same way tech buyers do.

What works is hyper-personalized ABM combined with product demonstrations. Higharc’s marketing team takes prospects’ actual floor plans from their websites, imports them into Higharc, and creates personalized landing pages showing what their homes would look like in the platform. Different personas see different experiences. The sales team doesn’t use BDRs. Instead, they invest in strategic AEs with deep industry connections.

“Marketing team’s job then is really to enable them and to give customer prospects a reason to spend some time with us because they’re just so busy,” Marc explains. “The challenge is typically getting in the room.”

The tactic that did work surprisingly well: video mailers. Physical mailers with built-in screens that play case studies when opened. At $30-50 per unit, sending 50 mailers that generate one deal is worth it. They generated several.

Distribution Through Trust Networks

The path to scale in homebuilding isn’t through paid acquisition or PLG motions. It’s through successful customer references in a highly networked industry. “Home building is quite local. Everyone kind of knows each other,” Marc 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. The entire GTM motion depends on customer success. It’s slower than PLG, but more efficient long-term and harder for competitors to replicate.

The company didn’t build a marketing team until they had strong product-market fit. When they did hire, mistakes happened by bringing in senior ICs working on things they didn’t want to do. The breakthrough came when Marc recruited a former Apple colleague as VP of Marketing.

The Silicon Valley Export Problem

Marc is direct about something many 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.”

He’s building remotely from North Carolina with 100 people spread across the US and Brazil. Remote work unlocked talent. But the playbook came from being inside the ecosystem first.

Vision Beyond Replacement

The endgame isn’t just replacing AutoCAD. “Every house that is built from scratch or that is remodeled should use Higharc,” Marc says. But the real vision is improving community quality and connectedness through better tools.

Marc eventually built his dream home on 50 acres with his brother and friends, creating a small community where kids now play together by a pond. That experience drives the company’s mission.

The GTM strategy reflects this long-term thinking. By building hard technology that creates proprietary data, distributing through trust networks, and aligning the business model with customer success, Higharc is playing a different game than most SaaS companies. It’s slower and harder. But for a company trying to change how homes are built, that patient approach might be the only one that works.