ProfileGuard

Google will suspend a business's profile and not send them any kind of notification. No email. Nothing in the dashboard. The listing just disappears from Maps and Search, the phone stops ringing, and the owner has no idea anything happened. I've watched it happen to a dentist who didn't notice for three weeks. He lost thousands in new patient calls over something he could've fixed in two days if he'd known.

This kept coming up when I was doing local SEO work. Every time I talked to a business owner who'd been suspended, the first thing they said was "I didn't even know." The second thing was "how long has it been like this?" and usually the answer made them sick.

The tools out there for this are either enterprise platforms that bundle monitoring into a $200+/mo package with a bunch of stuff nobody asked for, or you're checking your listing manually and hoping you notice before your customers do. Neither one made sense for a plumber or a dentist or a contractor who just needs someone watching the listing.

So I built ProfileGuard. It monitors GBP listings around the clock and alerts you when something changes. If a suspension slips past us, we handle the reinstatement ourselves. Two per year included. $49.99/mo, no contracts.

Stack is Supabase, Stripe, and Vercel. I built the whole thing solo. I have a background in IT and sysadmin work (7+ years of Microsoft 365, Azure AD, PowerShell) and taught myself Node.js and React.

For go-to-market I went with cold email. Built out 30 mailboxes across 6 domains on IONOS SMTP, warmed them, and ran campaigns through Smartlead. My first real client came from one of those emails. $250/mo contract for social media management and website hosting through my LLC, which also houses ProfileGuard. Not exactly a hockey stick growth chart but it was the first real money and I took my dad to Olive Garden to celebrate.

I also built a free GBP scan tool on the site that scores a business's profile and tells them what's at risk. That's been the best top-of-funnel thing so far because people can get value without paying anything and it gives me a reason to follow up.

Right now I'm focused on getting listed everywhere I can for backlinks and starting to build presence in local SEO communities. I'm one guy in Grand Rapids, Michigan working out of my grandparents' house. No funding, no cofounder in the traditional sense, just a friend who helps with outreach and content.

Happy to answer anything about the build, the cold email setup, or the GBP suspension problem in general. If you manage any kind of local business presence you've probably already run into some version of this.