Start Small
You see the expansive land before you at the start of the game and your first instinct might be to go nuts with roads. It can be tempting, with the first task before you being to connect the highways to roads. It’s so easy to get crazy with it and populate the city with a bunch of residential, commercial, and industrial areas. This is a really common mistake starting out, you definitely don’t have the economy to think big right now. Start small, maybe with a small square at the start, next to the highway roads. Get plenty of residential, a good industrial space, and commercial in between the two to keep citizens from getting sick. You need money to fund the electricity and water supply for the whole area too, so keep that in mind when budgeting.