Kevin Rose’s app startup North Technologies Inc. has announced the closure of its first app, the small photo and video sharing app Tiiny.

Launched in 2013, the app let users take a thumbnail-sized photo or video and share it to a 3×4 grid on the Tiiny home screen, which could only be seen by people who followed you. Bizarrely though, along with the inability to enlarge a video or picture to view it, in a somewhat Snapchat like matter every submission disappeared within 24 hours.

It was a classic case of a solution looking for a problem, and to Rose’s credit he admits that the product really wasn’t anything special in an official closure post to Medium.

“At the end of the day Tiiny didn’t find an audience” Rose writes, “and the product wasn’t a big enough improvement over similar services in an already insanely crowded space.”

North Co-founder Marc Hemeon added more details about the closure at Product Hunt:

While Tiiny is fun to use and has a slightly different point of view for photo and video sharing, it doesn’t materially do a better job than SMS, SnapChat, Instagram or Vine for sharing photos and videos.

Tiiny was a fun experiment, but ultimately the users have told us it’s not a strong enough product to replace their existing ways of sharing photos and videos.

Rose noted that the company had pushed out a final version of the application to the Apple App Store that allows users to download their photos and videos “before we shut the doors on our first experiment.”

It’s a fact of life that startups and apps fail all the time so it’s no huge disaster that Tiiny failed, and indeed given it was hardly noticed by anyone at all during its time on the app store it could be argued that it’s not worth covering.

The difference here though is that it came from Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, a pre-Reddit social voting site that was once valued at hundreds of millions of dollars (Google attempted to buy it for $200 million in 2008) but eventually sold for $500,000 in 2012 after Rose basically destroyed it in the space of a few years.

Rose has had mixed success since his days at Digg; he built then sold startup Milk, then spent time as a partner at Google Ventures, before co-founding North to build mobile apps.

North has backing to the tune of $5 million from investors including Vayner/RSE, Melo7 Tech Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Greylock Partners, Google Ventures and True Ventures, so it’s not going to run out of money anytime soon, but the death of Tiiny is not an auspicious start.