I'm going to give some advice that'll be contrarian to what quite a few people are saying here, but take it for what you've paid it for $0.
-- I've been hearing about the "sandbox" since I first started doing SEO in 2006... I'm convinced that there's no "sandbox" if you keep on building the site and its link profile increased exponentially with the site. I could show you a GSC on a six-month-old site that just progressively grew and grew.
-- If you're just learning SEO and working alone then you're honestly wasting all of your time doing SEO. You're competing with sites that add hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands of pages daily. Sites in my industry typically go from 500K to 100mil pages in scope, a one-page website wouldn't do much. It would be like using a handgun vs a standing army.
-- I've had six and seven-figure sites, but didn't do it with link-building schemes... I wouldn't touch ANYTHING anybody is selling on here in regard to content creation, PBNs, or indexing services. It's no wonder they all come back after a major update complaining that their rankings have been trashed. The secret is to build larger, more relevant sites, with useful content, and work to earn a larger footprint.
Want to rank a site? Have a site worth using and sharing.
-- Does all of that sound like it's outside of your scope and budget? Fine... Honestly, it's much easier to get traffic from TikTok and YouTube shorts than SEO today, and you can still be a one-man show and do well on both platforms.
BTW, I said this when I first started reading BHW and I'll say it again: Most of the people here have no idea what they're talking about.
Remember that when you think about what I wrote and remember I can very well be one of them too.
