As other people said, best to join a pool to start out if you don't want to invest in a starting amount of coins.

I read somewhere that in order to stake "regularly" the amount of coins needed are in the thousands, even heard that 10000GRC is recommended, otherwise you could possibly be waiting for months to cash in on your crunching work.

I'm not advertising for it but if your casually crunching with a laptop with cpu usage limited and some android phones like I am, it's best to start out in a pool and get garanteed payouts, you can always change to solo later on, if you feel ready for it.