Automation and Factory Builder Games

Am I doing something wrong or is the game extremely slow (at least at the start)?

Doing nothing but circuits in the most optimized way possible out of my 8 starters, I barely hit 250/s profit. The next recipe is at 320k, am I supposed to just afk?

Calculations indicate making circuits is barely 2x as profitable as selling pure gold, am I missing something? The tutorial was extremely bare bones and just taught me how to interact with the game but not what to do.