The Story of Higharc: From a $20,000 Mistake to Reimagining How Homes Are Built

The Story of Higharc: From a $20,000 Mistake to Reimagining How Homes Are Built

Marc Minor and his wife stood in North Carolina, evaluating 50 acres. They wanted to know three simple things: Should we buy this land? What can we build on it? What will it cost?

These aren’t complicated questions when shopping for cars or phones. But in homebuilding, getting answers meant spending $15,000 to $20,000 before knowing if buying the land made sense. They bailed on the purchase.

That expensive failure became the seed for something bigger. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Marc Minor, CEO and Co-Founder of Higharc, explained how that personal pain led him to build a platform changing how homes are designed, sold, and built.

The Digital Manufacturing Insight

Marc wasn’t looking to start a homebuilding company. He was working in 3D printing, deep in digital manufacturing. The core idea: a direct digital connection from design through manufacturing and distribution. “That kind of connectedness, that digital connectedness creates the capability to make better choices further upstream, be a lot more agile,” Marc explains.

When he hit the wall trying to build his house, something clicked. “It really clicked that we could take a lot of whats happening in digital manufacturing from a software enablement perspective and we could apply that over to homebuilding to solve these kinds of problems for homebuyers as well as for home builders,” Marc says.

Building a Team from Scratch

Most founders start companies with friends or former colleagues. Marc recruited three co-founders he’d never met before. The technical challenge required capabilities that rarely exist in the same person.

They needed to build a web-based CAD system to replace 41-year-old AutoCAD, which runs on over 90% of residential projects. “We haven’t really done things very differently over the last several decades in home building. Meanwhile, the world of web based software has moved forward a whole heck of a lot,” Marc notes.

“Theres a handful of people in the world who can really do that effectively,” Marc explains. So he went hunting. Peter Boyer came from Autodesk with web-based computer design 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.

“I actually went out and recruited each of them based on sort of what I thought we needed in the business,” Marc says. Six years later, all three remain.

Creating a New Category

The homebuilding software market is fragmented: Excel spreadsheets, point solutions, AutoCAD for design. Marc saw an opportunity to roll everything up.

“What we’ve done is we’ve taken the bits and bobs, the various point solutions and rolled them up into a new category we’re calling the home building cloud,” he explains. But Higharc didn’t just verticalize existing tools. They built something fundamentally different.

The CAD system creates a unique dataset about houses. That dataset becomes the foundation for everything else: estimating, 3D sales configurators, blueprint production. “Nobody has data about houses the way that we do, and then we can take that data and we can add all kinds of services around it,” Marc says.

The comparison to Toast and Square is instructive. Point-of-sale became their wedge. For Higharc, CAD is the wedge—harder to build, but defensible.

The Pain Point Advantage

Higharc didn’t need to create demand. The pain already existed. Homebuilders build 50+ houses per year with standardized designs, but manage everything with 41-year-old software and disconnected systems. “They’re stuck in a constant loop of kind of fire drilling, trying to connect the parts of their business,” Marc explains.

“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,” Marc says. The challenge is building confidence that Higharc can solve it.

Building Trust in a Networked Industry

Trust matters more than traffic in homebuilding. The industry operates as a local network where everyone knows each other. “Home building is quite local. Everyone kind of knows each other,” Marc explains. “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 shaped Higharc’s approach: heavy investment in implementation and support, strategic account executives instead of BDRs, marketing focused on sales enablement. Slower than PLG, but organic and defensible.

The Happy Ending

Marc eventually found his answer. He bought 50 acres with his brother and friends, subdivided it, and built a small community. Six homes went up. Now their kids play together by a pond. “The whole goal is to have a kind of connectedness to place as well as to, like, the people that you want to have in your lives,” Marc says.

That experience drives Higharc’s mission: “We’re trying to use technology to do that. We’re taking an economic path to do it. So by empowering builders, the folks who are responsible for these communities and houses, as a starting point, we want to be able to have a seat at the table so that over time, we can influence and change the communities themselves and improve the quality and the cost of the places that we live in.”

The Vision: Every Home

Looking forward, Marc’s ambition is clear. “Every house that is built from scratch or that is remodeled should use Higharc. That’s where we’re going.” The practical path exists—AutoCAD already represents 90% or more of residential projects.

But the deeper vision goes beyond software replacement. “If you could go around to different states in the US or in a country that we’re operating in outside of the US, and you go neighborhood to neighborhood, and it feels different, and it feels there’s a sense of belonging. You know, that is a sign of tools like Higharc being successful,” Marc explains. “If you have a sense of, like, utter sameness, whether you’re in Arizona or Massachusetts, then that’s us not doing what we hope to do.”

The story that started with a $20,000 mistake became a platform to change how homes are built—not through faster construction or cheaper materials, but through better tools that help builders create communities with character and belonging.