What to expect from a brand new domain
A new domain has no history, no links, and no accumulated evidence that it is worth showing. Google's caution is rational, and the practical effect is that months one to four are quiet regardless of how good the site is.
Understanding the shape of that period prevents a lot of premature panic and a lot of wasted spending.
The rough sequence
Weeks 1–3: discovery. Pages get crawled and indexed. Search Console starts showing impressions, mostly for your brand name and extremely long-tail phrases. Clicks are near zero.
Weeks 4–12: probation. Impressions rise for a widening set of queries, at deep positions. This looks like nothing happening. It is actually Google establishing what you are relevant to.
Months 3–6: first real rankings. Some queries reach page one, typically low-competition, long-tail, or brand-adjacent.
Months 6+: it depends on the work, not on the age.
None of these are guarantees, and a genuinely competitive commercial term may take much longer or never arrive.
What is worth doing during the quiet part
Get the technical foundations right once. Indexability, sitemap, canonical structure, internal linking. All cheaper now than after a thousand pages exist.
Start the archive. Search Console's sixteen-month window begins whenever you begin storing it. Starting on day one costs nothing and is the only way to ever have a full history.
Publish the pages that will take longest. The competitive commercial pages need the most time, so they should exist earliest, even if they are not perfect.
Get the first genuine links. Suppliers, partners, directories that actually matter in your industry, and anywhere the business is legitimately mentioned.
Do not judge anything by traffic. Watch indexed page count and impressions instead. Impressions rising while clicks stay flat is exactly what progress looks like at this stage.
The honest advice about paid
If you need customers in month one, that is a paid search question, not an SEO question. Running both is normal; expecting organic to substitute for paid in the first quarter is not.
The mistake is judging the SEO work by month-two revenue and abandoning it just before it starts to compound.