Real User Monitoring: Why Solo Founders Need It (Not Just Synthetic Tests)

Synthetic vs. real user monitoring

Synthetic monitoring (Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, Playwright) runs your site in a controlled environment with fixed conditions. Real User Monitoring (RUM) captures performance data from actual users on their actual devices and networks.

Why your Lighthouse score is misleading

Lighthouse runs on a simulated mid-range Android device on a 4G connection. Your users might be on a 3-year-old iPhone on public wifi. Or on a corporate laptop on a fast fiber connection. The distribution of real user experience is much wider than any single synthetic test.

What RUM tells you that Lighthouse doesn't

• P75 and P95 LCP — what the slowest 25% and 5% of users experience
• Performance by country — users in certain regions might be much slower
• Performance by device type — are mobile users suffering?
• Performance over time — did a recent deploy cause a regression?

Setting up RUM with ProdFix

ProdFix automatically captures Core Web Vitals from real user sessions. No additional setup — if ProdFix is installed, RUM is active. View your real user performance data in the Performance tab.

The solo founder use case

For a solo founder, RUM answers the question: "Is my app actually fast for my users?" A good Lighthouse score on your Macbook Pro doesn't mean your users in Southeast Asia on mobile have a good experience. RUM shows you the truth.