Company History

eGumball, Inc. was incorporated in September 2007 in Irvine, California. At the time, the product we work on every day was called the Google Local Business Center. It has carried five different names since 2005.

In April 2007, five months before we opened, Google launched 1-800-GOOG-411, a free directory assistance line that read out local business listings and connected the call. The data it read came from the same Local Business Center records we were already working on. Google shut it down in November 2010, having said openly that its purpose was collecting recorded speech to train a speech-to-text engine. That work became Voice Search, and eventually the assistant in everyone's pocket. It was the first time we watched local business data become the raw material for something else entirely. It was not the last.

Five names for one product

2005 — Google Local Business Center launches. Business owners can submit and manage their own listing for the first time.
2007 — eGumball is incorporated in September, in Irvine.
2010 — Local Business Center becomes Google Places.
2012 — Google Places becomes Google+ Local.
2014 — Google+ Local becomes Google My Business.
2021 — Google My Business becomes Google Business Profile.

Each rename came with new rules, new fields, and a period where nobody was certain what still worked. Clients who joined us during the Local Business Center years have now been through all four transitions with us. Three who signed in 2008 and 2009 are still in the top three today.

What the market did to everyone else

The housing crash took the first wave of local search agencies, because their clients were contractors and realtors who stopped spending overnight. Google's algorithm updates took the second wave, particularly the ones whose methods depended on shortcuts. The pandemic took a third. Very few companies that were selling local search marketing in 2007 are still selling it under the same name in 2026.

Growth, and then the reversal

eGumball appeared on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States four years running, ranking 79th in the United States as reported by the Orange County Register and the 8th fastest growing company in Orange County by The Orange County Business Journal. During our infant stages we employed 450 people, most of them doing by hand what the work required at the time: typing client details into directory after directory, then checking them again a month later.

That is no longer how it is done. Software we built now handles the repetitive work, monitored by a much smaller group of specialists. Today we employ over 100 people internationally. The saving went into our prices rather than our margin — a plan that would have cost $600 a month a decade ago costs $289 today and covers more.

Shrinking a payroll is not usually something a company advertises. We do, because the alternative was to keep it and keep charging for it.

What has not changed

The interface keeps moving. A phone line in 2008, a map pack on a phone in 2015, an AI assistant in 2026. What each of them reads is the same thing: a business's name, address, phone number, categories, hours and reviews, published consistently everywhere it appears. Get that right and you are findable. Get it wrong and you are invisible, for reasons that have nothing to do with how good you are at your job.

That has been the work since September 2007, and it is still the work.