I've been building Convertify — a free image converter in Rust + Next.js — for about 2 months. Here's where I am in GSC right now: 72 indexed pages Average position: 40.8 Impressions: ~90/day Clicks: basically 1 Not glamorous. But I spent time researching what's actually happening under the hood, and it changed how I think about the whole thing. The "Google Sandbox" thing Everyone talks about it. New site, no traffic, must be the sandbox right? John Mueller said it directly in 2019: "There is no sandbox." Google doesn't penalize new sites — it just hasn't collected enough trust signals yet. There's a difference. What actually happens is closer to this timeline: Week 1: pages get crawled and indexed Weeks 2–6: Google tests your pages on low-volume queries Month 2–3: first stable positions for long-tail keywords Month 4–6: rankings start to stabilize Month 6–12: meaningful traffic growth I'm at month 2.…