Collecting a celebrity’s John Hancock is a cherished pastime for fans of athletes, actors and musicians.
Eventually, though, the ink fades on the T-shirt, the poster rips, the baseball card is sold at a garage sale, and the memories slowly disappear.
But Stephen Madaffari, a Louisiana native and LSU graduate, is revolutionizing the autograph game with his app, GetSyn’d.
Instead of scrambling for a napkin and a pen to snag a hastily written autograph, users can take selfies with celebrities on their phones and have them digitally autograph the pictures.
Madaffari conceived the idea for the app in 2015, after realizing his kids had collected a staggering amount of autographed memorabilia. “The autographs were out of control,” he says.
He pitched the idea to his business partner Brian Moorman, a former punter for the Buffalo Bills, and the duo began working on a more efficient way to archive autographs.
“The engagement that the younger fans had with celebrities had become less about the hardware and more about the social interaction,” Madaffari says. “The days of walking around and someone signing something and then sticking it in a room forever had kind of passed the younger generation by.”
GetSyn’d launched in November of 2016.
Today, Madaffari, a partner in a New York City engineering firm, resides in Ponte Verde Beach, Florida, with his wife and two children. But he loves visiting Baton Rouge, especially for LSU football games—where just maybe he’ll someday get an athlete’s signature on his app. getsynd.com
How it works
Users swipe right on the free app’s home screen to launch the camera. The camera is automatically set to selfie mode so the user can snap a picture with the celebrity. The celeb can then can sign his or her autograph directly on the phone screen, which is superimposed on the photo. Users can pick the color of the autograph and rotate the picture if desired. The autographed picture instantly syncs up to your collection of pictures within the app, called the “Wall of Fame,” and to GetSynd.com’s cloud. Find GetSyn’d on the iTunes and Google Play stores.
This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of 225 Magazine.
