The LaTeX Lab
Professional Word to LaTeX and PDF to LaTeX conversion
TL;DR: I run thelatexlab.com (word to LaTeX and Pdf to LaTeX Conversion). To help researcher - I built 20 free BibTeX converter tools targeting keywords like "DOI to BibTeX", "ISBN to BibTeX", "PubMed to BibTeX", etc. They're genuinely useful - built from internal scripts I'd been using for client work - and they all live at https://thelatexlab.com/bibtex-generator/
The DOI to BibTeX : https://thelatexlab.com/doi-to-bibtex/
Technical notes if anyone's interested:
100% client-side except arXiv (no CORS → tiny PHP proxy, zero logs)
citation.js for parsing, hand-written writers for BibTeX/RIS/CSV
exceljs lazy-loaded only when the user picks .xlsx output (~270KB saved on every other path)
CSL templates lazy-loaded per citation style
50-record batch limit, parallel resolution, rate-limit-friendly to upstreams
I made LaTeXdiff online tool for comparing two .tex files and generating a diff file that you can copy or download.
Compare two .tex files or full LaTeX Zip projects
→ Paste .tex files or upload ZIP projects, then generate the diff file.
Two years ago someone in a Facebook group paid me $200 to format their journal paper in LaTeX. I'd learned LaTeX just to build my own resume — never thought it could be a business.
I sat on that idea for two years.
Finally in December 2025 I stopped procrastinating and launched The LaTeX Lab - a professional conversion service for researchers who need their Word documents and PDFs converted to submission-ready LaTeX.
The market is tiny. Roughly 10,000 potential customers worldwide. PhD students and researchers losing weeks fighting LaTeX errors before submission deadlines. Automated tools break their equations. No dedicated service exists that guarantees compilation. That's the gap.
How I built it in 7 days using Claude Pro ($23.60):
Day 1 - market research, competitor analysis, GTM plan
Day 2–3 - AI-assisted formatting pipeline (the core delivery system)
Day 4–5 - fully custom WordPress theme from scratch. PageSpeed 96 desktop, 80 mobile
Day 6 - SEO-optimised copy for every page
Day 7 - QA and launch
Total cost: $23.60.
The honest part: Claude doesn't do everything. You still need to know what you're building and QA everything yourself. But the leverage for a solo founder is real.
Now figuring out the harder part - getting discovered by researchers who don't even know a service like this exists.
Happy to answer questions on any part of the build — the AI pipeline, the WordPress theme, or the niche itself.
Note - used Claude to format this story.
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What caught my attention wasn't the size of the market.
It was the conclusion that discovery is the harder problem.
That may end up being exactly right.
I just find it interesting because once a company reaches this stage, several different bottlenecks can start producing very similar symptoms from the outside.
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Hey Saurabh Shah,
Saw your product on IH. I'm researching how solo founder keep their customers in the loop when they ship new stuff. Most teams I've talked to either don't do it or hate doing it manually.
Would love to hear how you handle it. 15 min, no pitch, just curious.
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