Remember: The auction house...

[Thorbalt]

- Its gonna be useless until a good chunk of people are at 60, because no one is starting with anything other than what they can vendor and from quest rewards

- pricing will have to be completely recalibrated from what it is now

- Neutral AH will be the best friend for rare items

So stash all your mats for a while and do trades (cloth for ore, etc) till the economy in classic gets going, because this is gonna be a very interesting start on the gold front

[Hey There Guys its Metro]

Remember: The Auction House is crucial for those reasons too.
Many players will be trying to sell greens and blues quickly to make a profit, so you can snipe some very powerful BOEs before the market for them has developed.

If everyone starts with no gold, people will be forced to sell these items for much less than they might eventually be worth, so if you are leveling a character that doesn't need a mount first (like paladin or druid) consider using that extra gold to power your self up every few levels.

People say its a bad idea, but it will dramatically cut down on time to kill, provided you don't need to invest the gold into a mount asap.

[Bethrezen]

It's true. You can't get something from nothing(obviously) off the AH. So have to build up the basics. Welcome to the very start of WoW.

[willemh]

The very first weeks are going to be extremely important actually. That's where you can set the foundation of being a rich boy . A small/new market is easy to manipulate!

[Chaelexi]

Multiple things to do, buy cheap elemental earths and water prior to AQ40 and naxx coming out. Save herbs you farm until the game later raiding when consumables will be needed for progression, if there is low amount of a needed herb on the AH buy it out and reset the price. Especially if already have some of those herbs already.

[anon5123]

As someone who has played through 4 different pserver launches: OP is wrong.

AH is not "useless" while people are leveling. The only difference is that low level mats have their prices go down over time as less people use them, and prices on rare items go up as more people get more gold.

The very first weeks are going to be extremely important actually. That's where you can set the foundation of being a rich boy . A small/new market is easy to manipulate!

You can't manipulate the AH unless you already have tons of gold to throw around buying out and reposting everyone else's auctions.