Customer profile: Natacha Grey of Swoon.ai
Natacha Grey has spent more than 20 years building for the web: as a front-end developer, a designer, a project manager, and a director of production at ad agencies. Across all of it, QA was the part that never kept up. Today she runs Swoon.ai, an agency that builds custom marketing lead journeys for niche brands in finance, entertainment and beyond.
Natacha is the first customer we've sat down with on camera. She found Replay QA on her own, started using it across client projects, and wired it into a stack of AI agents she built herself. We wanted to hear how it fits into an agency that ships for many clients at once, without a dedicated QA team.
Key moments
- [00:20] Why QA can't keep up with two-week release cycles
- [01:05] Finding Replay by asking ChatGPT
- [02:25] Regressing last week's fixes while development continues
- [03:00] The aha moment
- [04:05] Reactive vs. proactive QA teams
- [04:50] Manus to Claude to Gemini to Base44 to Replay
- [05:30] Narrowing the focus of a regression
- [06:10] Screen share: a focused regression after a server migration
- [08:05] Done with hair-on-fire
- [08:35] Advice for other agencies
Transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
Meet Natacha and Swoon
Thomas: [00:00] Why don't we start with you telling us about yourself and about Swoon.ai?
Natacha: Sure, definitely. I have over 20 years of experience in web development. And the biggest part of the project is the QA piece, right?
The QA piece has always been a really big stickler for me, because if the QA team doesn't have the right use cases for the product, and you're also doing agile development, and you're doing deployment cycles, let's say every two weeks, you're constantly potentially missing gaps in what is being tested. And you can't test fast enough.
"You're constantly missing gaps in what is being tested, and you can't test fast enough." [00:20]
About eight years ago, I started my own agency, and then I ended up rebranding and became Swoon. Swoon is focused on working with different types of niche brands, anywhere from finance to entertainment, and I run custom marketing lead journeys, basically.
My mind has just been overflowed with information, but solving QA has always been my biggest thing.
Finding Replay
Natacha: How I found Replay: you guys do a great job with your AI SEO, because I actually asked ChatGPT if there is some sort of autonomous QA browser that's not like BrowserStack, because I've tried all those testing tools.
"I actually asked ChatGPT if there is some sort of autonomous QA browser that's not like BrowserStack." [01:05]
I found Replay and I was like, "This is exactly what I need." What I found was that by connecting different AI tools, let's say Manus or Claude or Cursor, the one great thing these AI platforms do is that they can log GitHub issues. And I was like, "Oh, this is great," because then I don't have to be typing in the issues. That's the task of a QA engineer, writing up tickets in Jira.
So I liked that as step one for what these AI coding platforms could do, but it was still missing the customer journey piece. I was using AI to write the code. I was using AI to help me create customer journeys. But I didn't have the piece that was going through and running all those different journeys.
So I found Replay, I put in one of the projects I was working on, and then I realized it can connect to GitHub and it can rerun certain journeys. And I was like, "Oh my gosh. This is amazing." Because what it was able to do was, in parallel while we're developing, regress a lot of the issues that we had fixed the week before. And it was able to create a little bit more confidence that I didn't have to manually go in and block out eight hours of my day and just be clicking through everything to make sure everything works.
"I didn't have to block out eight hours of my day and just be clicking through everything to make sure everything works." [02:25]
The other piece is that, depending on the project I'm working on with Replay, I have a lot of different types of journeys that might be more front-end based or more back-end based…
Thomas: Right.
Natacha: …and the data on the back end will tell me whether or not everything is working on the front end.
The aha moment
Natacha: [03:00] So my aha moment was when I could step away and realize that Replay was helping me find new customer journeys that I didn't even think about. And that actually helps us iterate and develop our campaigns and our websites and our apps a lot better.
"My aha moment was realizing that Replay was helping me find new customer journeys that I didn't even think about." [03:00]
Thomas: Amazing. The way you're describing it is exactly the way we hoped people would react when they fired it up and used it.
Natacha: Awesome.
Reactive vs. proactive QA
Thomas: You mentioned that for this batch of recent projects, you didn't have QA resources. What did that look like when you had QA resources?
Natacha: I still have one client where we have a full-time QA team, and I'm actually trying to get them to approve a budget for their own Replay account to potentially take over.
Here's an example of what it looks like today. I have an influencer who's a client of mine, and they have a video streaming app and a website. At the end of the day, it's a skeleton that plays videos, but there are custom features and different types of things.
I feel like there are two types of QA teams. There are reactive QA teams, and there are proactive QA teams. And at the end of the day, there's this fear I have that if you don't run the full thing, you're going to include a bug in your new release that you weren't certain of.
"There are reactive QA teams, and there are proactive QA teams." [04:05]
A homegrown software factory
Thomas: That anxiety is real, right? Of stuff slipping through. You have something like 14 projects, and growing. What happens with Swoon? Do you hand these off to the clients' teams, or do you…
Natacha: So it's interesting. I got into building custom MCP servers about six months ago. I actually have Manus talking to Claude, Claude talking to Gemini, Gemini talking to Base44, Base44 talking to Replay…
"I have Manus talking to Claude, Claude talking to Gemini, Gemini talking to Base44, Base44 talking to Replay." [04:50]
Thomas: [05:00] Crazy.
Narrowing the focus
Natacha: One of the nice things I was able to see in Replay is the settings. I was actually looking at them earlier. You can turn off a lot of those features, because otherwise it's going to find stuff that isn't necessarily relevant for you.
What I've also been doing is learning how to reply in the chat a little better, with context, narrowing the focus. Narrowing the focus isn't just running a specific regression on one journey. It's running specific regressions on specific journeys, and narrowing what you're doing so you're not stepping on the same things that might already be acknowledged…
Thomas: Awesome.
Natacha: …by an open ticket.
"Narrowing what you're doing so you're not stepping on things that might already be acknowledged by an open ticket." [05:30]
Screen share: a focused regression
Thomas: Do you have any examples you could screen share of what a Replay project looks like where you're giving it that guidance?
Natacha: Yeah, all right.
Thomas: All good. I see it.
Natacha: So this is the current website for a YouTuber, Elizabeth April. [06:00] It's a WordPress website. I've been managing this website and the team for about four years. It has over a thousand videos, and we also have an app.
We decided to redesign the website, but we're doing something a little custom. We're doing a React front end, but the WordPress back end is going to stay the same, so the team won't have any loss of business. They're still managing the exact same website, but the front end is new.
Thomas: Right.
Natacha: So this is the React front end. It's really beautiful.
Thomas: Very nice.
Natacha: There are certain things that are still a little buggy. So if I go over here into Replay, you'll see we have 358 bugs here, and a lot of these need to be closed out.
For this one, what I've done is: "Run a fresh logged-out incognito regression pass against this URL. Do not log in. Do not create an account. [07:00] Do not add products to the cart. Do not check out. Start from the homepage. Follow every public navigation link. Go through all of these pages." And then at the end, a final reminder: "Do not close bugs, make edits, or create orders."
I'm telling it to give me the exact things I need to understand. The reason I'm doing this specific regression is that the React code was on a development server, and I needed to migrate it to production so that when we do the cutover to the new site, everything's on the same server. And by migrating from one server to another, things get broken.
So I'm not running a full regression of the site. I want a re-regression, logged in and logged out, of the website at a basic level. One of the things it'll probably find, for example, is that these are expanded. These shouldn't be this big, right?
So that's one example of a really focused regression in Replay.
Thomas: [08:00] It's great to see the culmination of all of your experience along the journey: computer science, software engineering, then QA. You can see in your prompt that it's not a layman's prompt. You know what you're doing.
Done with hair-on-fire
Natacha: My last 20 years of work in technology, right? Everyone's hair on fire. Everything's hair on fire.
Thomas: Yep, yep, yep.
Natacha: I just don't work that way anymore. You don't work that long in technology to keep that up. I want to do my work, go pick up my son from school, relax and have dinner, and not be waiting to get on my laptop.
"I want to do my work, go pick up my son from school, relax and have dinner, and not be waiting to get on my laptop." [08:05]
And yeah, Replay's been awesome.
Advice for other agencies
Natacha: If there's another agency listening to this, definitely check out Replay, because it will help you with your quality control. I think you don't need to hire a QA resource for your projects. I think this can definitely take a handle on it.
"If there's another agency listening to this, definitely check out Replay. You don't need to hire a QA resource for your projects." [08:35]
It helps you have more confidence delivering. Everyone's trying to move so fast [09:00] every day, and it helps you deliver faster.
If you're a company with your own SaaS application and you're using Replay, I think it's going to be an instrumental tool for the software team and also for the product team, because it'll help you understand where the bottlenecks are in the system, especially from a performance standpoint. If you have lots of APIs talking to each other, understanding those customer journeys and where the bottlenecks might be can help improve speed and efficiency.
But definitely, for an agency, having a larger Replay account is what you're going to need.
Thomas: Awesome. Natasha, thanks for spending time with me today. This was a lot of fun.
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