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How MindCloud Is Simplifying Integrations with AI - Anchor Group Podcast | Episode 25

Biggest B2B Trends of Q4 - Anchor Group Podcast | Episode: 26

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Podcast Transcript:

Michael (00:00)
Hey everybody, thanks for joining episode 25 of the Anchor Group Podcast. We have a good one teed up for you today. Jamie Royce is joining us to talk about integration platforms. Jamie is the CEO and founder of MindCloud, an AI-native iPaaS platform that manages integrations with various software systems.

If you manage an e-commerce site, work with NetSuite, or need to connect NetSuite or e-commerce to other platforms, stay tuned—this is a conversation you’ll want to hear. Let’s dive in. Jamie, thanks for joining today.

Jamie (01:15)
Awesome, thanks for having me, Michael. Great to be here and excited to talk about integrations.

Michael (01:19)
I’m really glad we could connect on this. I know your team—Patrick, Tyler, and I—run into each other at trade shows and on calls working deals. It’s always enjoyable to meet others from the company, so thanks for joining.

Jamie (01:34)
Yeah, absolutely. It’s my pleasure. I love talking about automating processes. Integrations have been near and dear to me my whole professional career. Before I got into programming, I hated doing repetitive tasks—copy and paste, copy and paste. I did a lot of administrative work early in my career, so I figured out macros and ways to automate things. I’ve always loved this subject, so I’m excited to be here.

Michael (02:06)
Fantastic. We’re excited to share your enthusiasm and experience with our audience. Before we dive into what MindCloud is and your background as its founder and CEO, give us a quick 30,000-foot overview—what is MindCloud?

Jamie (02:36)
MindCloud automates your entire tech stack. It eliminates manual data entry between systems and gives you a holistic view of your company without the “swivel chair” routine—jumping between screens to find data from different sources.

Software integration is simply taking separate systems and making them work together. MindCloud orchestrates all your software so your business can grow and scale without adding more personnel for manual data entry.

That’s how we started. Our first customer had two full-time employees copying and pasting orders from Walmart.com into Salesforce. When they expanded to Amazon, they had to hire another one. I offered to automate that for them and asked how much it would be worth. This was before MindCloud—when I was exploring what the market needed. He said he’d be on 20 marketplaces if he could, but he couldn’t afford the labor to copy and paste from each one.

So my co-founder, DC Cacavella, and I built an integration in a few weeks that replaced those two data-entry roles. The employees were repurposed, and the customer expanded to those 20 marketplaces. Over the next three years, their online sales grew 25x.

That’s the start of MindCloud. I love it because we empower our partners to compete with the big players who have teams of engineers to automate everything. From small and medium-sized businesses to enterprise-level companies, anyone can use this technology to streamline and automate their business processes.

Michael (05:33)
That’s amazing. I love how you described the orchestration aspect—how MindCloud brings everything together across marketplaces. If that was your first project, that’s quite a start!

Jamie (05:50)
Yeah, we knew it was a winner. And believe me, that wasn’t my first shot at running my own business. I knew I wanted a software company that leveraged the skills I’d learned over the past 20 years, but I had to listen to the market—who had a need and was willing to pay for it. I’d gone down other avenues where people didn’t see the value in what I thought were great solutions.

Listening to the market really rang the bell. Not only did this client need integrations, but others did too. I had friends who were top Amazon sellers still managing their entire inventory with Google Sheets. They had teams saying, “Don’t touch the Google Sheet or it’ll break everything,” because so many things were plugged into it but not automated.

Now, three years later, we’re working with multi-billion-dollar publicly traded companies, and it’s still surprising how many manual processes exist. People often assume that’s just how it has to be. I love discovering what’s going on under the hood and helping streamline those processes.

Michael (07:19)
Yeah, there’s nothing like a fragile Google Sheet or Excel doc you can’t let anyone touch because everything might break. I’ve been in those situations—people saying, “Don’t share that file!” I totally get what you mean.

Jamie (07:38)
Exactly. It takes five minutes to load because it’s connected to so many things.

Michael (07:45)
Right. At Anchor Group, we’re an e-commerce and NetSuite agency. We help companies optimize their NetSuite environments, and by partnering with MindCloud, we connect them to their e-commerce platforms. That’s where we find real value in integration platforms that are intuitive and built for success.

A little later, we’ll do a quick high-level demo of your platform for those watching on YouTube or Spotify so they can see the UI and how easy it is to use.

But before that, Jamie, take us down memory lane. Before MindCloud, what were you doing? What led you into the world of integrations?

Jamie (08:50)
Go back 20 years—I was working in a mailroom, cleaning up mailing lists after big mailings. When you send out a large batch, you get all the bad addresses returned, and you have to update your list quickly before the next round. There were no automated solutions back then. There were 20 of us working on this project, and it was supposed to take two to three weeks to remove all the bad addresses.

I remember sitting there watching everyone do the same repetitive task over and over. If you could have built a robot, all it would have to do is click a button and type in the information again and again for hours a day—mind-numbing work. I went back to my office, did some research, and thought, there has to be a way to automate this. If we had a file of all the bad addresses, I could look up the names in the database and automatically mark them.

There were no APIs then, so I reached out to the USPS and went down to the local headquarters in Los Angeles. They introduced me to the ACS Address Change Service, which allowed approved users to connect via FTP and download a full list of bad or changed addresses. It took me about two to four weeks to figure out how to connect to it and build a script using awk scripts and direct SQL queries to extract and update the data.

In the end, my little automation replaced 20 people working six to eight hours a day. I was blown away by how technology could save so much time and effort. Those hundreds of man-hours could now be used for something better. That experience stuck with me.

For the rest of my professional career, I always looked for ways to automate and work more efficiently so I could focus on more meaningful things. During COVID, I was working full-time for a tax company that was later bought by Avalara. I told my boss, “We’re paying consultants a lot of money to build API integrations I could do myself. Why not let me handle it and save $20,000 a year?” But in a big corporation, there’s a lot of red tape. They told me, “No, just stay in your lane.”

It frustrated me because the technology existed, but they weren’t willing to use it to save time and money. So on the side, I started researching what was out there and where the need was. I saw firsthand how companies were overpaying for integrations, and I knew I could do better. I started asking around—friends, family, anyone in business—what their biggest pain points were.

Then I ran into a friend who said, “I’m paying so much money to get these orders loaded into Salesforce. I need this process automated.” That was the spark. I kept asking questions, testing ideas, and realizing that what I thought people needed wasn’t always what they were willing to pay for. That discovery process is what led to the beginning of MindCloud.

Michael (12:57)
That’s such an important distinction—you weren’t just building a product you thought people wanted; you were identifying real needs in the market and creating a product that solved them. It sounds like at one of those jobs, you didn’t have the autonomy to do that within your role, but you still found a way to make it happen on your own time.

So, does the topic of integrations interest you because of how it helps people save time and money? Is it more about optimizing business processes or more about the software itself?

Jamie (13:48)
It’s a little of both. I’ve always loved working with software. Back in the 80s, I had a Commodore 64 and learned to type command prompts to run video games. Just giving commands to a computer and watching it perform tasks felt magical—and honestly, it still does. For most people, software still feels like magic.

I always wanted to create a software product that solved real problems and paid for itself. I’m into business, so it had to be something sustainable. Early on, I was looking for who was willing to pay for something I could deliver efficiently. That first year was tough—very few people were willing to pay what I thought the work was worth, and nobody wanted to pay a recurring fee. I had to figure out who the right audience was—what size company, what level of need would justify the cost of building and managing these systems.

After about a year, I secured a seed round of funding, built a small team, and within three months we were profitable. We had about 10 to 15 staff, and the company was earning more than it was spending each month. That was an amazing feeling.

Michael (15:33)
That’s incredible, especially that quickly. Some companies take years to reach profitability. Let me ask—when you started that first year, were you still working your other job, or did the side hustle eventually become your main thing?

Jamie (15:51)
For the first three months, I was just experimenting, trying to find something that could become my new career. After that, I told my boss I was leaving—this was around October 2022. It was scary to lose that steady income, knowing I’d have to hustle every month to replace it. Whether I paid myself or not depended on how the company did.

For about seven or eight months that first year, MindCloud was all I did—days, nights, weekends, every waking and unwaking hour.

Michael (16:36)
Yeah, the power of the hustle. I’ve heard entrepreneurs describe it as “eating glass” at times. But if you can push through those first few hard months—or even years—the grass really can be greener on the other side.

Now that listeners have a sense of the man behind MindCloud—the mind behind MindCloud—let’s get into what it actually does from a practical perspective.

In the NetSuite ERP ecosystem, when companies come to us and say, “We have NetSuite connected to our e-commerce website,” there are a few different ways to handle that. You can use APIs directly or leverage middleware options. Can you explain the different ways that can be set up and where MindCloud fits into that picture?

Jamie (18:02)
Absolutely. The original way is manual—you get an order on Shopify, then go into NetSuite and create a sales order. People still do that.

Then you have point-to-point integrations, where one software connects directly to another with nothing in between. That works fine if you have a developer who can build and maintain it, and if your requirements don’t change much. But for growing businesses, that’s rarely the case—things are always evolving.

That’s where the hub-and-spoke concept comes in. Different software tools connect to a central hub that standardizes communication between systems, allowing you to connect to anything else easily.

That’s where MindCloud fits. It’s a standard layer between platforms that converts the language of one software into a universal language so it can communicate with any other system, database, or FTP site. You don’t have to worry about translation or rebuilding integrations when things change.

For example, when Shopify switched from REST API to GraphQL, anyone with a point-to-point setup had to rebuild everything from scratch—paying developers again for the same work. With MindCloud, we normalize every connector. When Shopify made the switch, we updated it seamlessly. Our customers didn’t even notice; their integrations kept running as before.

Meanwhile, some competitors—who I won’t name—had very upset customers when they learned they’d have to pay again for a new connector. Some even saw subscription prices jump 150% without warning. That’s frustrating. It makes people feel handcuffed to their platform.

We wanted to eliminate that feeling. Technology should be simple, accessible, and beneficial to everyone. MindCloud’s mantra is to take complex software and make it simple—understandable, easy to use, and directly beneficial to the end user’s business.

Michael (21:35)
To bring that philosophy to life—where do you see that human element making the biggest impact? Is it mainly in creating user-friendly software, or is it the personal touch your team brings during setup and support?

Jamie (22:09)
That’s such an important question—and it’s really what differentiates MindCloud from other platforms.

With most competitors, customers are handed a powerful tool but left to figure it out themselves. They have to hire specialists—MuleSoft developers, Celigo experts, Jitterbit implementation teams—to set everything up and keep it running. It’s complicated, expensive, and stressful.

With MindCloud, that extra layer isn’t needed. You can do everything yourself, directly in the platform. There’s no need to bring in external developers or integration specialists.

The reason that’s possible is because we’re the only integration platform at this level that’s entirely AI-native. We were built in the last three years, not ten-plus years ago like most of our competitors. When they add AI, it’s often a superficial chatbot layer. For us, AI is embedded into every component of the platform—it’s part of the foundation.

Let me give you a quick story. One of our customers was evaluating Workato—our top competitor and a great company. Workato told them it would take three months to add support for an app called Kantata, a project management tool I hadn’t heard of. The rep told them, “We can have that added in three months; just sign here.”

When the prospect came to us, we had just released our AI import tool. It lets you take any app’s API documentation, import it straight into our backend, and automatically create the app and its endpoints.

I wasn’t prepared for a live test—but on that demo call, they gave me Kantata’s API documentation. I imported it right then, created the app, authenticated it with their credentials, and built their workflow—in 45 minutes.

Something our top competitor quoted three months for, we completed in under an hour.

Michael (25:31)
Wow, that’s an incredible use case—a true testament to AI being native to the platform. Let’s take a look under the hood and see what that looks like.

Jamie (25:35)
It was wild. Let’s go.

Michael (25:59)
As we transition to the demo, when you were building MindCloud, where did AI first enter the picture? Was it always part of your vision, or did it come later as the technology evolved?

Jamie (26:29)
It came about a year into the core development phase. At first, everything was written in code—there was no visual platform like what I’m about to show you. This was even before MindCloud existed as a company. I was just an LLC building custom API integrations by hand.

After building around 200 integrations, mostly for e-commerce, OpenAI launched and took the world by storm. We joined their developer program immediately—within a month we were already building with OpenAI inside our platform.

Now, we don’t rely solely on OpenAI; we support multiple models and use several across the platform. Every time there’s a new release, we integrate it.

Today, we have AI embedded in 44 different components under the hood—everything from importing API documentation and creating new apps to optimizing AWS resources based on workflow size and performance. It’s deeply integrated into how the platform operates.

Let me show you an example. This is our App Screen—where we create new apps for customers. A few weeks ago, someone wanted to add some obscure Mailchimp endpoints I’d never seen before. Here’s how that process works: you click on Documentation, add the public API link, and the system automatically pulls it in.

Michael (28:47)
Okay, so Jamie—you’re just pulling a public URL? You’re not uploading PDFs of documentation, you’re literally pulling a public URL?

Jamie (28:51)
That’s right. Any public URL. In fact, if we wanted to, we could scrape every publicly available API and automatically build every app.

Michael (29:06)
And before you go further—if you’re listening right now and you’re like me, you’ve probably heard a lot of companies claim to “have AI in their tooling.” But you never really know what that means. What we’re seeing here is an actual example of AI in action inside the MindCloud platform, and I appreciate that. It’s different from what most companies mean when they say they have AI.

Jamie (29:38)
Absolutely. This is a true peek under the hood—something most people never see in a demo.

What you’re looking at is our system scraping the Mailchimp API documentation, extracting all the sections and actions available, and proposing nearly 400 separate API calls. These range from simple actions like sending emails to very specific endpoints most people didn’t even know existed.

For customers who want enterprise-grade integrations with Mailchimp—or any other app—you can literally access every endpoint within minutes.

If you use a low-code tool like Zapier or Make, you’ll only get a few of the most common actions, maybe three or four. With MindCloud, you get the ease of use of Zapier but with enterprise-level power and security. We recently passed our SOC 2 audit, and we now have almost a billion workflows running in production across our customers.

To show you an example, one of Mailchimp’s more exotic endpoints—List Campaign Recipients—was imported directly from their API documentation. Our system automatically identified required parameters, filter options, and the exact endpoint URL. All of that was done by AI.

A human then reviews and tests every endpoint before deployment, but if I had to hand-code all of this, it would have taken three months. That’s why other platforms quote months for adding a new app. With MindCloud, customers can do it themselves, immediately.

Once imported, they can open a workflow, select Mailchimp, and instantly access every endpoint to build automations in a low-code environment.

Michael (32:44)
That’s really impressive. At Anchor Group, we do a lot with BigCommerce and Shopify—we’re even a Shopify agency partner. Could you show us how MindCloud could work between NetSuite and BigCommerce or NetSuite and Shopify?

Jamie (33:11)
Absolutely. NetSuite is our most popular connector, and we get a lot of customers coming from other platforms unhappy with how limited or rigid their previous connectors were.

Other tools often use black-box connectors—they’re built to do one thing. If you only want that one thing, great. But the second you need customization, you hit a wall and have to hire a developer. With MindCloud, you get full control and visibility at every step.

Let me show you our NetSuite–Shopify template. Anyone can use it. When you create a MindCloud account, you can browse our Recipes page—thousands of pre-built workflows that you can download and use right away. No need to reinvent the wheel.

Let’s scroll down to Shopify—you’ll see hundreds of recipes covering Salesforce, Samsara, SendGrid, ServiceTitan, ShipBob, ShipHawk, and so on. If you need something not on our platform, we can add it quickly.

Here’s the Shopify–NetSuite recipe. Workflows in MindCloud always start with a trigger—it can run on a schedule or via webhook. We even have a free tier where you can build and test workflows indefinitely (up to 100 live API calls per month).

So, you can create a webhook, test it in Postman, and feed data directly into your workflow. From there, you process the data however you like.

Step 1: Get orders from Shopify. We’re using their GraphQL endpoint since REST is no longer supported.
Step 2: Prepare the Shopify request. You can fully customize your query—something most competitors don’t allow because you can’t access raw API code. With MindCloud, you can.
Step 3: Loop through orders one by one and check whether each exists in NetSuite.

This is all low-code, and we recently released a no-code NetSuite connector. You can now do anything in NetSuite—search, import CSVs, create or update records—without writing a single line of code.

You can also create complex conditional logic: If this, then that. You can even build nested loops—something Zapier and Make can’t handle.

On other platforms like Jitterbit or Celigo, you’d need to split this into five different workflows (customer sync, item sync, order sync, invoice sync, etc.). With MindCloud, it’s all in one place. You can check if an invoice exists, create it if needed, create or assign a customer, and attach the sales order—all in a single flow.

Michael (38:45)
Mm-hmm.

Jamie (38:49)
And one last thing—let’s look at how AI builds custom steps.

In this view, you’ll see the input from the previous step at the top right, a custom code block on the left, and the output at the bottom right. Let’s say you want to create a random 10-digit number and return it. You simply describe it: “Create a random 10-digit number and return it as random_number.”

You can chat back and forth with the AI—it knows the full workflow context. You can tell it, “Take incoming data from one system and map it to another based on best fit,” and it will propose a full mapping between NetSuite and Shopify, which you can tweak.

Here, it generated a random number. Each time I run this, it’ll create a new one that can be used anywhere in the workflow. I could also say, “Add today’s date as an ISO string,” and it would do that instantly. Anything you can do with code, you can now do in one of our custom AI-powered blocks.

Michael (40:17)
So that’s AI running behind the scenes, creating it all for you—at least the first draft, right? As you said, there’s still a human review step, but the AI handles that initial heavy lifting.

Jamie (40:21)
That’s right. We don’t believe in full AI autonomy. Everything you’ve seen is about proposals and recommendations—ways to do things better. The AI takes on the difficult, time-consuming work and then proposes what it thinks the best version looks like. A human always verifies it. That principle applies across all our AI components—it’s about doing things safely and intelligently, not letting the computer make unchecked decisions.

Michael (41:08)
Right. And I think that’s where most people are landing with AI today. You still need a human mind behind the end product, but AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting upfront without losing that human touch. It’s powerful stuff, and it’s very cool how AI is native within the MindCloud system.

You’ve given us a great demo showing what that actually looks like. If you’re driving right now and listening, I’d encourage you to go back later and watch this section. Jamie does a great job of actually showing how AI functions within the system—not just talking about it in theory.

Now, Jamie, I’ve seen MindCloud announce a number of partnerships recently on LinkedIn. Would you want to highlight a few and explain how you’re leveraging those relationships?

Jamie (42:38)
Yeah, absolutely. Partnerships are incredible because they allow us to help other companies with problems they don’t want to deal with. Integrations are our specialty—we do them really well, very fast, and at a lower cost than competitors thanks to our AI-native platform. That efficiency lets us invest more in the human side—support, onboarding, and customer service.

One of our recent partners is Rithum, the company that acquired ChannelAdvisor, CommerceHub, and Disco—names many people in the e-commerce world recognize. This partnership is great because complex integrations like NetSuite–Rithum can now be handled by us. Their internal teams can focus on improving their product instead of managing integrations, while MindCloud handles all the external connectivity their customers need.

We’ve also partnered with several 3PLs and WMS providers—Legiwa, ShipHawk, ShipBob, and Orderful for EDI integrations, just to name a few.

What’s important is that we maintain a harmonious relationship with our partners. We know what we do best, and we know what they do best. If a customer comes to us for something one of our partners specializes in, we send them that way—and vice versa. Often, we end up integrating both sides anyway.

We also recently launched our partnership program, which is live on our website. You can sign up to become a partner, or participate in our referral program for those who want to refer clients to MindCloud.

Partnerships have really propelled us this past year. We became profitable about a year in, and as of last month, we’re officially cash-flow positive. About 50% of our total sales now come directly from partner relationships.

Michael (45:15)
That’s fantastic—and really a testament to how powerful partnerships can be. For businesses looking for integrations, it also shows the strength of your ecosystem and credibility.

As we wrap up, Jamie, what’s the one biggest takeaway you’d want listeners to remember as they head into work tomorrow?

Jamie (46:14)
Integrations are a headache—MindCloud is the Advil. We take the headache away. We make it possible to do what you’re trying to do without the complexity, cost, or frustration of managing integrations. Partner with MindCloud, let us handle that burden, and focus on what you do best while we handle what we do best.

Michael (46:50)
There you go. From our perspective at Anchor Group—we’re a BigCommerce and Shopify agency partner, and we also work extensively in SuiteCommerce and the NetSuite ecosystem—we’ve found MindCloud to be a really strong option for many of our clients, especially because AI is so deeply embedded in the platform. It’s a true differentiator.

So Jamie, if people want to learn more or connect with you, what’s the best way to do that?

Jamie (47:29)
The best way is through our website: mindcloud.co. There’s a big button on the homepage where you can schedule a call with our team.

If you want to try the platform for free, go to app.mindcloud.co—no cost, no credit card required. You’ll get 100 API calls per month free, forever, and you can build and develop as much as you want. Everything I showed you today is available there.

Or, if you’d rather not deal with the setup, we offer a white-glove service where we build and manage everything for you. Either way, we’ll help you get started. And of course, follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.

Michael (48:28)
Fantastic. Jamie, thank you for taking the time to chat with us on the Anchor Group Podcast. You shared a lot of insight, great stories, and an impressive demo of the platform.

Jamie (48:44)
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been great.

Michael (48:47)
And for everyone listening—if you have questions, check the show notes or leave a comment if you’re watching on YouTube. Be sure to tune in next time on the Anchor Group Podcast, where we’ll continue exploring NetSuite and e-commerce topics to help you grow and scale your business.

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As both a BigCommerce Certified Partner and an Oracle NetSuite Alliance Partner, Anchor Group is ready to handle BigCommerce and NetSuite projects alike! Whether you already have one platform and are looking to integrate the other, are considering a full-scale implementation of both platforms, or simply need support with ongoing customizations, our team is ready to help answer any questions you might have! Get in touch!

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