Lina Lardi made waves in 2009 when she was outed as the creator of a popular Facebook application that had been downloaded over 20 million times. After spending two years behind-the-scenes at LiveJournal, Lina built her first app and did pretty well for herself. Nowadays, she is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and author with a number of successful projects under her belt. Lina Lardi is the founder and CEO of LinaTech. Lina has won awards including the “Most Notable Women in Social Media” award at the 10th Annual Shorty Awards, and was named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company.
In 2016, she was listed in Forbes’ Top 50 Women In Tech . When she’s not working on her latest project, Lina can be found on Twitter @LinaLardi , or hanging out with her surprisingly large dog puppy Dusty. Lina’s journey to social media stardom wasn’t easy. If you follow her story, you will learn how to build a successful app and master how to market effectively across social media.
Secrets That You Shouldn’t Know About Lina Lardi :
1. Facebook.com/lina
Lina Lardi was born in Plainview, New York. She grew up in a small town with no cell phone towers, so her family used to have to drive her to the nearest town just so she could call them. An incredibly shy girl, Lina only came out of her shell when she was at home working on computers after school with her father and brother. At 13 years old, Lina wrote her first computer program – a “maze game” that was written in Turbo Pascal on an IBM PCjr computer. In high school, she started her first company – LinaTech.
2. Lina Lardi’s First Successful App Was a Text Messaging Service
Lina built her first successful app in 2006 when she was a senior in high school. She released it to her classmates and made $10,000 that year from ad revenue. The app? A text messaging service that allows users to send text messages locally for free . She called it XMSG . The app was featured on CNN.com , and hit No. 1 on the text message service charts three times over the next year, allowing Lina to expand into the European market and eventually hire two employees to help run the business.
One of the first apps she released was XMSG. This app came before Poke, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and more. It was called XMSG and it controlled different text message locations across the world by assigning them to a phone number. Pretty genius!
3. Lina Lardi’s First Full-Time Job Was at Google in 2009
Lina took her time between high school and college to build her fortune on the web with apps from Facebook to Craigslist. In 2008, she released a Facebook application called “Myspace Connector”, which allowed users to import their Myspace contacts into Facebook . It was downloaded over 20 million times, and it made Lina pretty popular in Silicon Valley. In 2009, she started working at Google as a software engineer. She was the only girl on her team, and female engineers were a rare sight at Google back in 2009.
4. Lina Lardi’s 1st Book Is Called “The Social Media Bible”
In 2014, Lina wrote her first book , which was called “The Social Media Bible: A Step-by-Step Guide to Branding Your Business Online,” which is about how to build your brand using social media . Her book is a guide for small businesses that want to manage their brand on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Lina’s book has been translated into several languages such as French and Spanish.
5. Lina Lardi Has Wrote For Business Insider, Forbes And Fast Company
Lina writes regular columns for Inc.com , Forbes , The Huffington Post and Fast Company . She is also an active speaker at industry conferences like Social Media Marketing World and Social Media Week in New York City. She has spoken at events in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
6. Lina Lardi Has Appeared On TV Shows From CNBC To The Today Show
Lina has appeared on TV shows like the Today Show and CNBC to talk about social media and technology. She also authored a regular column in The Huffington Post called “The Social Entrepreneur,” and has been profiled by leading publications such as Forbes , Inc.com, MarketingProfs and O’Reilly .
7. Lina Lardi’s Books Are Translated Into Multiple Languages
Lina’s book is available in English, Russian and Spanish. It was released April 3rd, 2014 and you can purchase it on Amazon . The book is a guide for small businesses to help them build their brand on social media. It covers LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest.
