4 founders to watch: The Midst Mastermind Cohort 1

What happens when four women — an engineering director, a psychotherapist, a CMO-turned–autoimmune-disorder expert, and a marketer walk into a Zoom room? And what happens when they talk openly about the businesses they’re building from the ground up?

Entrepreneurial sparks fly. Permissions are granted. Expertise is shared. Tearjerkers are told. Referrals and connections are made. Magic happens, and businesses grow.

This is what’s happening in The Midst Mastermind, our six-month program for 40+ entrepreneurial women who are building something — a business, a product or service, a second act, or a body of work — and want a trusted circle of peers who understand both the ambition and the midlife context that comes with it.

I’m having the time of my life with the women you’re about to meet. As I’m writing this in mid-July 2026, we’ve got just two months left of the program, and we’re getting ready for the second cohort. If you’re interested in applying for the second cohort that starts in fall 2026, please fill out this brief form or email me at amy@the-midst.com.

Stage IV endometriosis, medical menopause at 42, and one very annoying piece of sticky residue

Lindsey Morando spent seven doctors and $20,000 trying to find out what was wrong with her body. In 2025, at 42, she finally got the answer: Stage IV endometriosis and adenomyosis. Excision surgery followed fast, and then just one week post-opp due to the severity of her case a harder decision — remove her ovaries and uterus, and go straight into medical menopause. Eight weeks after her second surgery, which was July 2025, she woke up to a completely different body than the one she’d been fighting to understand.

The estradiol patch helped, but what it left behind did not. Twice a week, she was peeling off adhesive residue that clung to her skin no matter what she used on it — oils that felt greasy and stained her clothes, alcohol wipes that punished her already-reactive skin, or nothing at all, which just meant scrubbing in the shower until it came off. One of those scrubbing sessions left her with an instant rash. That was the moment she knew there had to be a better way.

At that point, she wasn’t just frustrated because of the residue itself. She was frustrated because recovering from major surgery with five new scars and learning about hormone therapy felt like a full-time job. The residue the estrogen patch left was simply one more reminder that even the smallest parts of menopause seemed unnecessarily hard.

In the hours outside her day job as a product marketing leader in tech, she built one. It’s called your off day (so good, right?): an oil-free, no-rinse adhesive remover, developed with skincare chemists, made to lift patch residue without oil, fragrance, or a 12-step routine. Apply, wipe, move on. The whole point is that it disappears from your to-do list, not adds to it.

What makes Lindsey’s positioning work is how precisely she’s refused to widen it. She isn’t building a wellness brand for “women’s health” broadly, and she isn’t chasing every adjacent customer who could technically use the product (bandage residue, tape residue — sure, it works, but that’s not who she’s building for). She’s building for one specific woman, at one specific moment: mid-40s, exhausted by how much bandwidth midlife suddenly demands, staring at sticky residue on her skin for the hundredth time, thinking, why is something this small still this annoying. Not someone looking for another wellness identity. Someone looking for one less thing to manage.

One of the reasons why she joined The Midst Mastermind was to get feedback from her target customer. And wouldn’t you know: All of us in the group, including me, are women over 40 and several of us proudly wear an Estradiol patch. 

The product isn’t on shelves yet, but you can get a preview of how she thinks on her Substack, Hot Flash Energy, where she writes about work, the body, and midlife “coming in hot, without apology.”

Want to be first to know about the launch? Sign up here on https://hotflashenergy.com/.

From librarian to FAANG to smart-home tech founder: Lisa Shissler Smith’s non-linear career, explained

By 9 p.m., most of the seven people in Lisa Shissler Smith’s house are winding down. She isn’t. After a full day directing engineering teams at her day job, she’s often at her kitchen table with her husband, Shane, sketching out a lighting plan for a client’s screened porch or troubleshooting a Control4 install for Daisy Triangle NC, the smart-home company they’re building together.

It’s not her first reinvention. Lisa started as a librarian — she liked bringing people and information together, and two aunts had made the job look cool. It took a chancellor asking her, mid-barbecue-tour of North Carolina, “Lisa, can I ask why you’re working a job that seems almost exactly opposite of what you really want to do?” for her to admit she wanted tech. She taught herself on the job, carried what she learned from role to role, and eventually became an engineering manager — first at Spreedly, then Netflix, and now at a large insurance company. 

Somewhere in there, she’s raised five kids, two of whom live with epilepsy, and got called “Office Mom” by a colleague who meant it kindly and then stopped taking her seriously the moment he decided that’s who she was.

She’s spent years talking with other women in tech through exactly that moment — the one where you realize the industry has quietly started counting you out. “You make the decision about how you tell your story,” she said, a couple of years ago, in this story about ageism in tech for The Midst. Lisa’s own story is that a career that zigzags isn’t a liability; it’s pattern recognition. She’s watched enough technologies get crowned “the future” and then quietly retired within two years to know that the person who’s seen the cycle before is worth more than the person who only knows the current trend.

Daisy Triangle is that same instinct, aimed at a different problem. Lisa spent 25 years making sure complex systems worked reliably for people who never had to think about how — that’s the whole job of great infrastructure. Now she and Shane, who learned precision the hard way as a Navy sonar technician, bring that standard to homes across Chapel Hill, Durham, and the Triangle: lighting, shades, whole-home audio, networks that don’t buckle the moment you add a smart lock. The gap they kept seeing was the same one Lisa built her tech career solving — systems that get installed and then abandoned, with no one left to call when something breaks on a Sunday night.

Lisa isn’t choosing between the corporate ladder and the entrepreneurial leap. For now, anyway. She’s doing the tech leadership job and building the family business at the same time, on the theory that the discipline from one makes her better at the other. If you’re in the Triangle and your smart home has never quite worked the way it was supposed to, that’s the whole pitch: someone finally owns the problem. Get to know Shane and Lisa’s approach at daisyco.com/triangle-nc.

Simla Somturk is on a mission to reach 10,000 women in perimenopause with autoimmune disorder 

Picture Kate. Mid-40s, C-level, another night of broken sleep behind her. She works out two hours a day, knows her macros cold — and her pants are still getting tighter, she’s catching every cold going around, she’s having trouble focusing (this used to be her superpower!), and she just ended up in the ER with unexplained excruciating GI pain (and told “there’s nothing wrong with you”).

She’s putting in 60-hour weeks, strong and steady on the outside, because she’s always been the disciplined overachiever who shows up and overdelivers. Underneath it, she’s exhausted, foggy, spiraling with anxiety and sometimes even rage, having trouble recognizing herself, and wondering: I’ve done everything right. Why does my body feel like it’s falling apart? Is this all there is from now on?

That woman is exactly who Simla Somturk built her business for. Which makes sense, because for a long time, Simla was that woman.

Simla has quit corporate America twice. The first time, her body made the decision for her — a flight home in a wheelchair at 32, a string of misdiagnoses, and the eventual, hard-won discovery that she was living with multiple autoimmune conditions, plus fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and multiple chemical sensitivity, on top of the IBS, asthma, and chronic bronchitis she’d been battling for years. There was no roadmap for healing any of it. She had to build one herself, piece by piece, and reached full remission from all of her chronic conditions — more than ten years now. Then she layered perimenopause on top of a body she’d only just finished rebuilding, and had to do it again. Her advice, in her own words: don’t wait until it all really hits the fan.

The second time she quit, in late 2025, it was on her own terms — before her body’s whispers turned into shouting again. She left to build HealthCraft, her holistic nutrition and lifestyle coaching practice for high-achieving women 40+ navigating autoimmune disease and perimenopause at once, because the two conditions compound each other, and perimenopause alone raises the odds of new-onset or worsening autoimmune by four to five times.

What makes Simla hard to replace isn’t just the healing — it’s the incredible résumé around it: 

• A Wharton MBA 
• C-level roles inside the wellness and supplement industry, where she saw exactly how the business of “wellness” is built, and where it quietly fails women. 
• Twenty years as a nutrition and holistic health coach, with over a decade in clinical practice and a certification in the Autoimmune Protocol. 

Where Function Health hands Kate a stack of lab results and AI-generated, generic protocols, a rushed doctor’s visit hands her “this is normal, don’t worry about it,” and an influencer hands her questionable advice with no idea if it fits her life, Simla guides Kate step-by-step through her highly curated, personalized plan built on the six practices of Simla’s framework, The HealthCraft Way™, that together help restore health and balance from the inside out — nutrition, movement, rest, creativity, connection, environment — plus the structure and accountability to actually live it, built by someone who has done it herself, twice.

Simla joined The Midst Mastermind cohort 1 shortly after relaunching HealthCraft, already ahead of where most new founders start: a solid, growing client list, sharp positioning, and a Substack, Flame & Flare, building a community around exactly this collision of perimenopause and autoimmune disease.

She’s counting toward something specific: she aims to help 10,000 women in the next decade ease the perimenopausal transition and reverse the tide of autoimmune. If Kate is you, or someone you love, start with Simla’s essay, then follow along at Flame & Flare. 

Book a complimentary 30-minute discovery call here to explore your health goals with Simla and cover questions about her services to determine if you’re a mutual fit.

Maiden, Mother, Crone… and Empress? Kate Higgins names the fourth phase of womanhood.

Kate Higgins isn’t here to fix your midlife crisis. She’s here to argue it isn’t one. And not just that, she believes that midlife is an opportunity to actually CELEBRATE the woman you’ve become. 

Picture Julie. She’s 52, an editor, married to an engineer, two teenagers at home. On paper, nothing is wrong: stable marriage, stable job, a nice life outside a midsized city. But she’s been quietly dissatisfied for about five years now — since her kids became more independent and the house got quiet enough for her to notice. 

She used to work in television. Now she edits other people’s words for a living and privately can’t stand it. She’s not sure if her marriage is the problem or just the mirror. She keeps signing up for retreats and creativity courses that never quite stick. She wants to write or paint or start a podcast, and instead she sits at her desk wondering if it’s too late, if she’s too old, if what she’s feeling is even normal.

Kate Higgins has an answer for Julie, and it isn’t therapy-as-usual.

A bit more about Kate: She spent her 20s and 30s living two lives at once: earning a master’s in clinical social work and working as a mental health professional by day, performing in underground New York clubs until 3 a.m.

Over 25 years as a licensed therapist, she’s worked with nearly every population there is — the chronically mentally ill, incarcerated people, people experiencing homelessness, addicts. Almost nothing rattles her, which is precisely the point: she built her deescalation instincts and her read on human emotion in rooms far heavier than a midlife identity crisis.

Then midlife broke her open, too. A cross-country move, the loss of both parents, an unwanted hysterectomy, and leaving her corporate job — all in five years. She went looking for support built for what she was actually facing, spiritually and emotionally, not just the weight-loss-and-anti-aging playbook aimed at women her age. She couldn’t find it, so she built it.

Kate created Craft Your Crown, a deeply experiential, immersive experience, that lives at the intersection of reflection, creativity, and sacred ceremony.

Women are guided through the four feminine archetypes — Maiden, Mother, Empress, and Crone — as they create their own ceremonial crown using natural elements and found objects. Pulling from both her showgirl background and clinical expertise, the process is part self reflection, part art-making, and part powerful threshold ritual. 

At the end, each woman steps through a naming and crowning ceremony, and has her portrait taken in her finished crown — a tangible keepsake of the woman she is becoming.

While so many workshops aimed at midlife women focus on self improvement, Craft Your Crown is instead, a rite of passage — a place where women are fully seen, honored, and crowned in their truth. What makes it unique is the way Kate blends her 25 years of clinical expertise with creative ritual and sacred play, creating an experience that feels both therapeutic and genuinely magical.

Tradition gives women three life phases: Maiden, Mother, Crone. Kate argues there’s a missing fourth: the Empress Phase, the sacred pause between the end of the reproductive years and the onset of elder wisdom, roughly ages 45 to 65. It’s the container for everything Julie is feeling and can’t name — and it’s the backbone of Kate’s practice, Your Magical Midlife: her 1:1 mentorship Claim Your Crown, her private retreat The Coronation, and her podcast, ranked among the top 25 for women over 50.

Where a self-help book offers no accountability and traditional therapy stays static and problem-focused, Kate blends clinical training with real ritual and real irreverence — proof that healing doesn’t have to be either serious or silly. It can be both.

She joined The Midst Mastermind cohort 1 to sharpen that positioning and build the next chapter of Your Magical Midlife. If Julie is you, start at yourmagicalmidlife.com.