My school alone wastes 135,000 hours/year on research cold emails. I built LabLetter to fix that.
LabLetter--Smarter research cold emails in seconds.
Hey everyone. Writing cold emails to professors for research opportunities is the 7th circle of hell in the pre-med field (or for any undergrad student trying to get involved in research). I've spent the past few months writing them, and each email would take so long to write because I had to go through the tedious task of sifting through all their research, finding a paper that interests me, reading it, and then connecting it to something I've done to explain why I'm "particularly interested in their lab."
Did that for over 20 labs. 20 cold emails, about 30-60 minutes per email.
All 20 professors read them. No one responded. Not even a "no."
Now you could go and blame the quality of my emails, being too direct, not asking the right questions, whatever. But there's a sad reality within pre-med: professors leaving you on read is just the norm. It's common practice in the pre-med space for anyone--regardless of how smart or accomplished--to have to send up to 100 cold emails before they actually find an opening, or are even dignified with a response. Ask any undergrad student you know who's in a lab, 9 out of 10 of them can show you the 60+ dead emails they had to send before they found anything.
At my school alone there's around 3,000 pre-med students. 20-100 cold emails per student. 30-60 minutes per cold email. 90% left on read. Conservatively, that's 135,000 hours down the gutter. In my school alone.
So obviously kids are going to start using ChatGPT & Claude to write their emails. They're probably not going to go anywhere anyway, but you have to throw out all those shots for the 1 time it will.
The problem is that LLM's don't know how to write good emails. Even if you gave them a "template," they're still going to regurgitate slop that any professor can tell is AI from a mile away, and they're certainly not going to be able to consistently connect your experience to a lab's work without making up some Cinderella story about how "fascinating" BDNF is to them, and how reading that research paper "made it all click."
So I built LabLetter. You give it the professor's name, lab, some info on their research, and your experience, and it writes a personalized cold email in under a minute. An email with natural structure and no exaggerated praise, that picks only the relevant parts of your background instead of jamming everything in. All you have to do is update the lab info and research excerpt, and you'll get a clean draft with every generation. If you want to change it to sound more like you, you can edit the Subject Line and Email Body within the website itself, then copy it and send it off.
Completely free, no account/sign-up, no personal data stored. Just want to help people stop wasting so much damn time.
You can try it at https://www.labletter.app/ . I'm genuinely looking for feedback, especially if anything reads as fake or AI-ish. If you're not pre-med or looking for any type of research position, send this to someone you know who is. It's millions of hours being wasted out there per year, and students deserve the dignity of their time back.