👋 Founder

Hi, I'm Vlad. I built
Pulscar after one bad morning.

Vlad Kliuienkov, Founder of Pulscar
Vlad Kliuienkov
Founder · Pulscar · Currently in Thailand 🇹🇭
Previously: Glocal (health travel, 105 countries) · CPAHunter (41,000 brands)

The $6,000 lesson

In 2025, my car started making a strange sound somewhere near the engine. I drove it to a mechanic in Phuket. He charged me $380 for a "full diagnostic" and told me it was a serious internal issue.

Then a different shop. Then another. Over six months I spent roughly $6,000 chasing a problem that didn't exist. Different mechanics gave me different "expert" diagnoses. Each one ended in a bill, and the sound never went away.

When the floods hit my district that year, I ended up trapped in my car with the engine making sounds I couldn't interpret — sounds that might mean "drive now" or "stop immediately." I had no way to know.

That's when I realized: the problem isn't cars. It's that we can't tell what's actually wrong without paying someone we don't fully trust.

Why AI sound diagnosis

A trained mechanic can identify dozens of issues by ear alone. Loose heat shields, worn belts, failing bearings, exhaust leaks — they all sound different. The information is in the sound. The problem is access to someone who can read it.

AI changed that. Modern audio models can be trained on thousands of engine recordings paired with verified diagnoses. Pulscar runs your 30-second clip through frequency analysis (FFT) and pattern matching against 200+ known fault signatures. It produces a written report your mechanic could verify — but you don't need to take it to one to know what's likely going on.

$19.99 instead of $300. Ten minutes instead of three days. Honest instead of incentivized.

What I'm building

Pulscar isn't a subscription, an app, or a scanner you buy. It's a one-time service. You record your engine for 30 seconds with the phone you already have. You pay $19.99. You get a PDF report in 10 minutes with an Engine Health Score, the most likely cause of any anomaly, severity assessment, 6-month outlook, and estimated repair cost ranges.

If we can't deliver that report in 10 minutes — full refund, no questions.

Background

Before Pulscar I built Glocal — a health and medical travel platform that connects patients in 105 countries with vetted clinics and specialists. And before that, CPAHunter — an affiliate marketing analytics platform that aggregates data from 41,000 brands and helps publishers find profitable partnerships.

Both projects taught me the same lesson: the most useful products solve problems the founder personally hit a wall on. Glocal came from getting bad medical advice abroad. CPAHunter came from spending months in Excel comparing affiliate offers. Pulscar came from $6,000 in misdiagnosed repairs and one terrifying drive in a flood.

If you have a car

You don't need to wait until something obviously breaks. Most engine failures start weeks before any warning light comes on. They're audible long before they're visible.

Try Pulscar once. If the report doesn't tell you something useful, you get your $19.99 back. If it does — you'll know something about your engine that even your mechanic might miss.

Ready to know what your engine is saying?

30 seconds of audio. $19.99. PDF report in 10 minutes. Full refund if not delivered.

🔍 Check My Engine — $19.99
Want to learn more?
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A practical guide to the seven most common clicking sounds — which mean stop driving immediately, which are cheap fixes, and how to tell the difference in under 3 minutes.

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