First of get some LR in the soon as possible as it will increase the biodiversity of bacteria and microfauna in your aquarium and help with the cycling process. Getting biologically alive water and sand is not too difficult, but you want all the die off in the LR to happen and be handled by the system. If you cycle your water for 6 weeks to prepare for animals and then add all your live rock at once… you really need to wait at least another month to let your tank cycle. (In My Opinion)
Daily testing is for sure important. Test Ammonia, Nitrite, and Nitrate and record all the results in a log.(I used Microsoft excel, but just a little scratch notebook will work)
At this point you may not see much ammonia any more as it may have been converted into Nitrite. After you have the majority of LR in your tank try adding prawn, krill, table/cocktail shrimp, silver sides, or something of the sort(meaty fleshy aquatic animal to rot away in your tank and cause a spike in ammonia) Since you have already had some level of ammonia processed in your tank before this time it may happen fairly quickly. I would not recommend adding any live animals to your tank(besides bacteria and rock) until the tank has sat for at least a month after your ammonia spike and at least a week after your Nitrate has returned to 0ppm. Some people may argue you can add animals when your Nitrates are below 20ppm, but trust me you want your tank to be able to process Nitrates well before you are adding fish and food or your tank may struggle to keep up with the waste.
Again all of this is my opinion and you will find marine tanks have been set up in many millions of different ways.
I wouldn’t spend much time on the forums on this website, but this is a good article to read through if you haven’t already.
Also as far as adding a clean up crew I would not do that first. Higher invertebrate life such as snails, hermits, and crabs are more sensitive to water chemistry fluctuation then hardy soft corals and fish. You can add a couple of hermit crabs, but I would steer clear of snails. I know a lot of people add snails early to eat algae, but I would be shocked if you could find a single reefer who can say they never lost a snail during there first 6 months of running an aquarium.
If you are moving towards a reef I would personally add zoanthids first, then mushrooms(if desired), then hermit crabs, then fish, then snails…. Suppose it really depends on what you want to put in there.
What size tank? What is your salinity and temp? What do you have in the tank for water movement? What sort of filtration?(I would personally leave off skimmers and remove carbon during at least the first three weeks of the cycling process)
Hope this helps.