My experience: I've had a service called HRM.monster, the domain is up for renewal on the 19th of this month, and am thinking on letting it lapse, for a name change - it is off a product called HRMgo, I have had 0 users since the purchase a year ago, and spent $750 for it from a Flippa ad thinking I hit the money spot. Eventually ended up finding out that the software was $69 package download and not custom built, as the main website led me to believe. I tried to build relationships with various people to gain their trust in providing services to them for a bridge to their clientele (not compete, but add additional support services), a win win with the company and their clientele. No one wanted to talk with me. I heard comments later-on that said I wasn't made for being in the business. It's brutal.
While my experience may be different than yours, there are other factors at play in with God having something todo with it. There is no greater thing than word of mouth, and the house is the answer.
I been trying for over a year and too chose to use email as letting clients know I existed, I didn't get anything in return.
I would try talking to influencers who you think would benefit by a simple DM or email; you might want to look into LinkedIn's higher tiered contact searching for better contact specific to your demographic, and services such as audience lab if you have the ability of spending $500/mo you can get a few contact lists that have an excess of 300k+ lines of info w/ various other relevant data that you could also sell additional services to.
There's also building relationships through advertising on Facebook, Google, etc., there's also vibe.co, and caasie.co... budget minded services for getting your name and caasie allows targeting specific towards your industry through video ads... where as vibe puts you on billboards.
While I don't have all the answers, having something different than the crowd is also a sell, like creating a service and building that need that answers a problem you deal with at work problem; something that you could turn into a serivce, and that also is viable for other people en masse.
It is really an inundation of services out there as you've stated. The early ones caught on, had fewer people contacting them.
The ones with financial backing win, because of the marketing factor, and the NEED building for the product. The best thing is to think of a project that women need, as they're the hard core consumer. I can't think of buying myself anything except food in the last 10 years, the occasional new pair of shoes, and slacks/shirt. I've used the same computer for the last 10 years, and its virtually my life rn...
It's best to join a chamber and sell your services to on what you can do vs your product, you sound pretty sound in the AI generated apps, so you've got that going for you, just need ideas, keep building until someone finds a need for your services, you could essentially steal someones idea, unless you end up getting requested to sign an NDA with said person if you went through the chamber.
Sounds like you got a people problem though ;-)