I listened in on the GridCoin hangout this afternoon over on the Mumble channel. This being my first time, I thought it would be better if I just listened to what the others had to say, and get a feel for how the hangout usually goes.

One of the topics was about how to get the word out about GridCoin once the team requirement has been lifted. Lots of great ideas were exchanged such as working with project admins to let them know we've dropped the team requirement and would like to help amp up the activity of their project by encouraging the users to join GridCoin.

I've thought a bit about this, and here's what I would do:

Use GridCoin as a Team-Building Tool

Before starting with GridCoin, I founded a team on SETI@Home called AMD Ryzen Builds. I am still the founder of that team (but no longer a member of the team, obviously). My team is in the top 1% on SETI@Home currently and at its peak back when I was contributing, it was in the top 40 teams on the whole project with over 400,000 RAC.

When the team requirement is lifted, let me tell you what I'm going to do:

1. I'm going to re-join my beloved AMD Ryzen Builds team.
2. Convert my AMD Ryzen Builds team to a BOINC-wide team (IE: the team will exist in all BOINC projects).
3. Send out a mass email/message to my 108 current team members telling them "GOOD NEWS, I can now get you paid for your contributions to this team through GridCoin."
4. I'm going to announce on the AMD SubReddit (just like I have many times before) that I'm recruiting new members and guess what, now you can get paid through GridCoin. In the past, my requests for new team members on that sub has hit the "Hot" page and gained me 30+ new crunchers.
5. I will hold monthly/quarterly contests within my team where I will pay out GRC rewards to the top crunchers.

One way to get the word out about GridCoin without coming off "spammy" is by working together with BOINC team founders 1-on-1 and helping them understand how GridCoin can help them recruit new members from their team and how they could even use their own mined GridCoin to further incentivize their team members to be active. In doing so, you turn people who are already respected influencers in the BOINC community into advertising portals for GridCoin.

Reinforce how GridCoin Solves a Problem

As I labored for months to recruit people to my BOINC team who had recently adopted the brand new Ryzen CPU, a single comment kept coming up over and over that I just had no answer for:

"I'd love to help, but running BOINC uses a lot of electricity, and electricity isn't free. I can't justify doing this for free."

I can't begin to tell you how excited I am to (hopefully soon) have an answer for those folks when I am recruiting for my team. Finally I will be able to tell them: "You no longer have to crunch for free! Sign up for GridCoin and you can be paid in CryptoCurrency that you can exchange for BitCoin and spend on new hardware, or even exchange back to FIAT and just pay the bills!"

Start your own BOINC teams!

Why not contribute to the competitive team nature of BOINC by starting your own teams and recruiting people through popular SubReddits? As long as you're promoting a team related to the users of that Sub, the moderators usually love the idea (especially if the Sub is related to computing or science) and won't bother you as long as you're not repeatedly spamming the Sub. Once you've built up a good number of people on your team, start letting your team members know about how they can leverage GridCoin to justify keeping their rigs running 24/7.

The potential of what we can do once the team requirement is dropped is insane. Let's try to think outside the box, a bit :-)