Am I trying to teach the market or wrong marketing?

Hey dear community 👋.
I’ve just recently set my mind into creating a new product as an indie hacker, as a side project to my day work.

As a freelancer in the past and consultant I found it hard to brand and promote yourself. Also at networking events, which are key to meeting potential customers or partnerships, I found it challenging to effectively find the right people to mingle with and when I do, to make the “contact exchange” moment meaningful and rememberable.

I had a vision to make a tool to allow people like me to have an easy exchange of contacts, make it stand out and impressive.
After checking existing solutions I understood what I’m going to do is “Digital Business Cards”, but compared to the alternatives I’m going to do it better, cheaper and much more feature rich.
Aiming modestly to build a sustainable business to set myself financially independent and hopefully help my family members who have hard time on low-end jobs and health issues.

Now, what I discovered, and I guess it’s pretty common for other indie hackers, is that finding and building audience is hard. Almost seems impossible.
Talking to other freelancers, consultants and service providers, very little of them do really care about their personal branding and more focused on word of mouth.

This got me questioning myself, am I trying to solve a problem worth solving? Could be that maybe my audience simple are not aware (yet) that they need a product as mine?

What would you do in such case?