Brand new site - how long until I start building links?

Little background, I have around 3200 blog posts and 600 products on this site - it does drop shipping for pet supplies and the content is targeting long tail keywords related to pets - so for example, how to train an older dog to use a pee pad etc.

I am currently promoting the site on Instagram by sharing funny, viral clips and have gotten almost 100 followers in the last 2 weeks, no paid followers or anything just posting fun content and doing follow/unfollow.

I am planning on letting the content sit for at least a month while promoting on social media and possibly running some paid ads. At what point do you recommend actively building links to get the site ranked? I am thinking in around 3-6 months but it has been forever since I've done any SEO. I have been working as a software developer for the last 7 years and have not been in the game.

Any insight is appreciated.

you can build links from day 1

Usually, the best time to start a link building campaign is about 3–4 months after creating a brand new site or buying new domain

You can really start building them right away.

Start with social media links. (Fb, Twitter, IG, etc).

Move on to your tier 1 links. Finding good, healthy sites with traffic.

I would say when you will start to receive organic traffic - after week or so of launching.
It should be logic - organic traffic from Google = organic backlinks.

Since it's a new site, you can start with building foundational backlinks right away (as much as 10-20 per week till you've reached 100 or so.) These include profile links, press releases, wikipedia links, etc. They are basically the most white-hat ones.

Then you may proceed with guest posts, niche edits, forum/reddit/quora posts. These are more powerful and hence you should be fine with 1-3 links per week till your site reaches the 6 months mark.

Just make sure to have a diversified profile consisting of both no-follow and do-follow links in order to look natural.

BTW, I'm curious - How come you have 3200 blog posts on a brand new site? Are these AI generated? Programmatically generated?

You are so far on the good track.
But still you can promote more using links, by doing awful content available for users here and there.
Start building links !

In my opinion, It's important to note that link building is a continuous process, and results may not be immediate. The time it takes to start building significant links will depend on the efforts you invest, the quality of your content, and how effectively you promote your website. Initially Concentrate more in On-page Optimization once after completing the Plan for Link Building

I appreciate all the helpful replies.

My thought process is to wait and see what content ranks and then build links to that content. This site is brand new and yes I ordered around 3200 blog posts that are AI generated but edited by humans and have images and videos added in.

I am focusing on social media initially and have around 80 followers on instagram. I am committed to not buying followers or doing anything black hat on social media.

My topic is the pet supplies niche. I am actually buying social media services from a guy who sells on here, specifically ascend viral.