Have to say CONTENT before you even think about traffic, sucky content in the beggining can ruin things for you. Get it ready to go, slap it online and SEO the heck out of it.
I think it would be better to place the ads after sometime as you can experiment with the placement of ads as you would be receiving some traffic by then. But it's just my personal opinion.
This is my threshold: #When my domain has atleast an age of 6 months, except when i have bought an aged domain #When i have atleast a minimum traffic of 50UV per day, may reduce it depending on the niche i am #When i have atleast 40+ articles on it, might reduce this too if the competition has much lesser article on themselves I try to stick to this most of the time and it has helped in keeping the CPM of my adsense account to respectable percentage