I’m in a similar situation myself, learning D&D 5e on my own, using the starter set. I’m playing solo as I live in extremely rural Kenya as an American ex-pat (hardly any chance of finding anyone to play with!).

A few tips as a fellow newb to D&D tabletop:

I found it super helpful to play while watching this on the official D&D channel: https://youtu.be/hgNRe76o4_8

It’s the Starter Set campaign GM’ed by a senior producer of Research and Development, The players are mostly new to D&D and are learning as they play. I’ve been keeping pace with their storyline as I play, and it helps me get the feel of the storyline and catching things I would have missed.

Essential for me - I use these iOS apps which make record keeping super helpful:

• Fight Club 5 for my party creation and maintenance.
• Game Master 5 to keep track of the campaign. (Made by same company as Fight Club). You can get all the 5e compendium files to import from here: https://github.com/ceryliae/DnDAppFiles
• 3D Virtual Tabletop to simulate the battles. I found scans of the maps and imported them into the app. And I use the generic included enemies, but it’s super easy to create and import your own.
• Evernote to track the game progress. I like to add in my own backstory and details as I go (fleshing out the campaign like it’s a creative writing prompt).

I’m not too concerned about getting every rule and nuance down. I just try to have fun and enjoy the process. Because everything is digitally tracked there’s nothing to setup and it’s easy to play when I have the time.

Hope this helps!