How long before first sale?

To answer the main question, with less than 100 models you have fewer possibilities than 300, for example, but that depends on the quality of the models and, above all, that people want to buy them.
  If you have a market for your models, your buyers will want more, so having a respectable amount of models is always necessary.
   Sell, , CGT does its part promoting jobs and authors, creating opportunities and keeping the pulse of the market, they do their job well, but it does not guarantee that a particular artist will sell his model, this must be done by the artist offering something that people want to buy.
    Before starting to sell, I needed some time to define the line I was going to follow, but once a minimum of models coherent with the proposed line was reached, sales were not slow to arrive.
     Another thing is to make money seriously, that requires working full-time and building a bomb-proof catalog

took me 5 month to get my first sell with just 4 model if i remember correctly. my advice dont think to much about the money just build your model and one day it will sold

great to see another blenderhead here

thanx for all the answers! they are very helpful for me also!

I sold my first model 15 days after publishing it, after that it lasted like 2 months without selling anything, even though I had already published at least 3 other models.
It will always depend a lot on the needs of the buyers, the price of your product and the use.

My recommendation is that you also add wireframe views to your models.

You gonna have a hard time getting a general consensus on this, people have a wide spectrum of experiences here, ranging from no sales to massive sales, this is common on all selling platforms bytheways.

The only thing you need to know is that this site has massive amounts of traffic (https://www.similarweb.com/website/cgtrader.com#overview) and there is great demand for 3D content. You only need to know what type of content is in demand and try to avoid making stuff that already is there in large quantity.

Dalia Lasaite, the CEO of CGTrader, presents the best practices for selling 3D models, the new Analytics tool for designers and trends in the 3D market (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI_HpXuPWms). You definitely need to listen from minute 14 tot the end where she is talking about advantages of the analytics tool to get a notion of what is actually in demand.

I sell on average about 20 models per month here (with my small 53 models collection) and experience the website gaining ever more traction, my belief is that this website will eventually harbor all top professionals when they notice how efficient this site actually is (including the exclusives from elsewhere).

This is going to sound hard but if this site is not worth it for you then no site will. The potential is here but it remains to be seen if you can get it out. Do not blame CGtrader if you cant, it actually depends on you wherever you go. This place already has everything you need to make it, the rest depends on you.

These questions your asking here can potentially dilute yourself.
Are you motivating yourself to get actual results or are you measuring whether you should quit?

Tip: Just do what is necessary to get the success you want, ask the right questions, do stuff, fail and rethink until things work out.

This would be my advice to you and myself (because everyone forgets this from time to time).

The point is, no one can tell you upfront if you would succeed or not (this includes yourself), some (the less successful) will probably say its not worth trying, others (the successful) will probably say everything is going work out fine.

So you just going to keep getting conflicting messages.

Again, it actually depends on you in this situation, just make up your own mind and probably best not listen to the ones that not succeed and complain.

Are you going to do what it takes or not, that's the real question.

Quit if you do not like the work but keep at it if you love it and want it to lead to success.
Again, this place already has everything you need to make it work.