Introducing the TinyFish Students and Ambassadors Programs

We didn't set out to build a community program. We noticed one forming without us.

For months, some of the best builds on TinyFish came from people nobody had onboarded. Students building on TinyFish for projects that had nothing to do with class. People we'd never spoken to referring their entire group chat. Build logs on X, tagged to us, from accounts with 200 followers and a real thing they'd made.

Nobody asked them to. Nobody paid them. And all we had to give back was a like, some extra credits, and if we could, a conversation. That needed to change, so we launched two programs: the TinyFish Students Program and the TinyFish Ambassadors Program.

TL;DR

• The TinyFish Students Program is for anyone with a school or university email. Students get $35 in free credits in their TinyFish wallet to build AI agents that work on the live web.
• The TinyFish Ambassadors Program is open to everyone, student or not. Ambassadors build, run events and communities, and bring other builders along.
• Both programs run on TinyBounties, your dashboard for everything: bounties, submissions, gift cards, events, the leaderboard and your progress. Pick a bounty, build it, and get a gift card when it's approved, with the build published under your name.
• You can grow into bigger roles: Campus Lead (students), Advocate and Regional Ambassador (ambassadors), each with perks like event budgets, a Hall of Fame listing and early access.
• Join here: tinyfish.ai/students or tinyfish.ai/ambassadors.

Why we started the programs

I'll be honest. The reason we had so little to give back is the same reason we could never have found those people ourselves. The marketing team at TinyFish is a handful of people in Palo Alto and Saigon, and the thing we're building for is the entire web.

AI agents are about to become the biggest users of the internet, most of what's online was never built with them in mind, and the people who are going to fix that are scattered across every campus and city we've never been to. There's no realistic way for a team our size to reach all of them, and we knew that.

What we hadn't fully appreciated is that the people already building on TinyFish were doing exactly that, for us, without being asked. Every build log someone posted, every group chat referral, every "you should try this" in a Discord we'd never heard of, was getting us in front of people we could never have found ourselves. And it was landing better than anything we could have done, because it was coming from someone the other person already trusted.

So at some point the question changed. It stopped being how do we get to these people, and became how do we back the people who are already there and already doing it.

Two tracks, one Bounty Board

When we looked at who these people actually were, they weren't that different from each other. Everyone was building something. The main thing that separated them was whether they were doing it from a campus or from somewhere else, so that's how we split it. (Ok, maybe we did the split in our heads for our own sanity.)

You can move between the two, and your history comes with you. Students who graduate just carry on in the Ambassadors track.

What is the TinyFish Students Program?

The Students Program is the campus track. The idea is that you get to build things for the agentic web while you're still in school, things that people actually use, and that work gets to exist somewhere other than your laptop, with your name on it.

The timing matters more than it might seem. The web that agents use is being worked out right now, mostly by people who are early and curious and don't have a decade of the old way to unlearn, and the things they build in the next couple of years will quietly become how this works for everyone after them. Being one of those people while you're still a student is a strange and rare position to be in, and we'd like to make it count.

What do students get?

• $35 in free credits in your TinyFish wallet when you sign up with your school email.
• Bounties with gift cards. Pick a bounty off the board and build it. When it's approved you get a gift card, and the build is published in the TinyFish Build Library under your name, and written up as a post in TinyFish Build Logs.
• A TinyFish certification for your LinkedIn and a direct line to our engineering team, if you keep building.
• Campus Lead. If you're the person pulling others on your campus into this, you become a Campus Lead, with a budget from us to run events and a spot in the Hall of Fame.

The point of all of it is that when you graduate and someone asks what you've built, you have something real to show them, and it's something that was part of the web getting rebuilt.

How do I join the Students Program?

1. Sign up at tinyfish.ai/students with your school email and a password (not "Continue with Google/Microsoft"). Your $35 is added to your TinyFish wallet automatically.
2. Sign in at tinybounties.com with the same account. It's your dashboard for everything in the program. Claim a bounty there.
3. Build it and submit it. Approved builds earn a gift card.
4. Join the Discord with the access code.

No $35? Email community@tinyfish.ai and we'll check your school.

What is the TinyFish Ambassadors Program?

The Ambassadors Program is for everyone who isn't on a campus, and honestly it's mostly the same thing. Same board, same bounties, same gift cards, your name on your work. You don't have to be a student and you don't stop being a builder.

The difference is that this track also covers what happens between builds: the meetup you run, the Discord, the newsletter, or the group chat where you tell people what you've been making. If you're showing what you've built and bringing your people along, you're already an ambassador.

Every shift in how the web works has spread this way, through someone people already trusted saying "look at this," long before any company's marketing caught up. The people doing that for the agentic web right now are going to have shaped it, and shaped what we build, in a way that's hard to see from the inside but very real.

What do Ambassadors get?

• Bounties and gift cards, on the same board as students.
• Event funding. If you host events, we fund them.
• Advocate status. Once enough of the people you bring in are building too (50 qualified referrals in a quarter), you become an Advocate: a verified badge, a Hall of Fame listing, early access to what we're working on, and a say in what we build next.
• Regional Ambassador. The people who end up running the community in their region become Regional Ambassadors, with a budget to match.

How do I join the Ambassadors Program?

1. Sign up at tinyfish.ai/ambassadors with any email. Start from this page so your account joins the Ambassadors Program.
2. Share your referral link (on your dashboard's Referrals page) with your community.
3. Sign in at tinybounties.com with the same account. It's your dashboard for everything: bounties, events and your progress.
4. Join the Discord with the access code.

What we're not doing

If the whole point is that the community reaches further than we can, then the community has to actually be real, and we've all seen enough programs that weren't. So there are a couple of things we've been careful about.

Nobody gets a script. Ambassadors say what they actually think, in their own words and in whatever language their people speak. If that means someone tells their Discord that a bounty was badly scoped, that's fine. We'd rather hear it than not.

The work always goes up under your name. Not as a community submission, not as a TinyFish example. Yours.

Campus events: workshop first, then build

Over the next month there are launch events happening on campuses from Stanford to Sydney, and students are hosting all of them. We cover the budget, send over the deck and the bounties, and join a few of them on a video call. Each one starts with a workshop and then moves into a build challenge, because we tried doing it the other way around and it didn't work for anyone.

There won't be a TinyFish employee in most of those rooms, which is sort of the entire idea. If you want an event at your campus or in your community, request one on TinyBounties and we'll help you run it.

The Discord is home base for all of it: bounty drops, office hours with the team, and the channel where people post what they shipped at 2 AM.

Go build something

• Students: tinyfish.ai/students
• Ambassadors: tinyfish.ai/ambassadors

Pick a bounty, build it, and share what you made. Tag TinyFish on X (@Tiny_Fish), LinkedIn (TinyFish) and Instagram (@tinyfish_ai). We read everything.

Keep reading

• TinyFish Student Program: Tiers, Rewards and How to Join
• TinyFish Ambassador Program: Tiers, Rewards and How to Join
• How to Get $35 in Free AI Agent Credits as a Student (Step by Step)