Apply for The Midst Mastermind

Interesting things happen when you’re early to market.

In our case, we were early to perimenopause awareness and midlife empowerment — before it was a movement or a market valued at $24 billion.

When you’re early, you have ample time to incubate. To identify gaps, listen to hundreds of stories about the modern midlife experience, meet movers and shakers, experiment, and learn from other pioneers’ triumphs and tribulations.

In the last seven years, we’ve:

• Created the largest collection of stories produced by women in perimenopause about perimenopause, many of whom are experts in menopause health and wellness
• Built community, networking opportunities, and events that bring together thought leaders, founders, and women on the front lines of the modern midlife experience
• Consulted with startups and Fortune 500 companies about the perimenopause and longevity “scenes” and what makes women over 40 tick

The Midst has grown organically into a hotbed for women supporting entrepreneurial women over 40. This is where new apps are discovered, founders make their first sales, writers find their voices, women talk about the careers they helped invent, and menopause specialists are recognized for the heroes they are.

It’s even where women have hot flashes live onstage.

The Midst is where ideas go to make something of themselves

In the Age of AI — rife with ageism, corporate restructuring, layoffs, and opportunities for those with agency — we know first-hand just how much women over 40 bring to the table. As a generation, we have rich experience, diverse skills, unique perspectives, and networks of brilliant colleagues. We are innovators in women’s leadership and collaboration, and AI cannot entirely replace us.

Women over 40 have broken ground, smashed ceilings, learned things the hard way, endured great change, stood up for our rights, overcome setbacks, and managed to survive life’s messy middle. This is why women in the midst are primed for entrepreneurship and forging new career territory. This is why we started The Midst Mastermind.

The Midst Mastermind is for women over 40 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.

How The Midst Mastermind works

• The Midst Mastermind helps womyn over 40 productize their skills and experience, understand what their customers want, and position their businesses so they can live fulfilling, non-corporate lives.
• Time frame: Apply now for the second cohort, which begins in September 2026. Deadline to apply: August 14, 2026. I’m excited to hear from you!
• Cost: $500 per month for 6 months, or $2,800 when you pay upfront (saving $200)
• Meet two times per month for 90–120 minutes each session, on Zoom. We’ll record every session and share the recordings and transcripts with you.
• We’ll guide you through a structured business-development curriculum. Each meeting focuses on a particular topic, including positioning and messaging, content strategy, sustainability, and community building.
• “Hot seat” format: During each meeting, one member of the group will share a specific challenge or decision they’re facing. The group asks clarifying questions, then offers focused input. The hot-seat member listens without defending, then decides the actions she’ll take.
• Between meetings, we’ll share resources, ideas, and progress on Slack, and provide feedback on each other’s worksheets — vision, positioning, etc.
• We will invite a handful of subject-matter experts in entrepreneurship, PR, and branding to attend some of the sessions. Experts will be selected based on needs of the mastermind group.
• I will facilitate, organize, and actively participate in the mastermind. As an expert content strategist, I will also provide one-to-one content strategy and SEO consulting to help your business or project get found in search engines.
• After the mastermind wraps, we will feature your story (see similar examples here) on the-midst.com and The Midst Substack.

What are the goals of our mastermind group?

We will help you achieve more than you would on your own.

• Growth and progress: The primary goal is to help you move your business forward — faster than you would on your own. The group accelerates progress by helping you think bigger, make informed decisions, and avoid costly mistakes.
• Problem solving: Bring your challenges to the group and benefit from multiple perspectives. Oftentimes, fellow members have already faced the same problem, and their insights save you enormous time and energy.
• Accountability: One of the most powerful functions of The Midst Mastermind is holding members to their commitments. When you report back to people you respect, you follow through at a much higher rate than when you’re only accountable to yourself.
• Expanded thinking: Being around ambitious, thoughtful people raises your own sense of what’s possible. You’ll leave meetings with ideas, connections, or reframes you probably wouldn’t arrive at alone. The group pushes you out of your limited perspective and opens your mind to think more strategically.
• Honest feedback: Most people in our lives tell us what we want to hear. A good mastermind group tells you what you need to hear — kindly but directly. This kind of candid input is rare and valuable.
• Connection and community: Especially for entrepreneurs, isolation is a real challenge. A mastermind creates a trusted inner circle of peers who genuinely understand what you’re going through, which provides both emotional support and practical camaraderie.
• Shared resources: Members naturally share contacts, tools, opportunities, and knowledge with each other over time, creating a network effect that benefits everyone in the group.

Who is The Midst Mastermind for?

• You are 40+ (but if you’re not quite 40 and are building a business targeting women 40+, we welcome you to apply.)
• You are entrepreneurial or want to become more entrepreneurial — you enjoy identifying opportunities, taking initiative, and managing calculated risks to create value, innovation, or new business ventures. You are proactive, adaptable, and comfortable with (or need help with) uncertainty, often seeing problems as opportunities to create economic, social, or cultural impact.
• You wish to make the most of your skillset and refresh your outlook for the entrepreneurial age.

• You enjoy brainstorming and sharing ideas, and personal experiences that help others.
• Not required, but if you offer products or services for a target audience of women over 40, The Midst and our network specializes in exactly that.
• You’re done climbing the corporate ladder or need help stepping down from it.
• If you’re introverted, we’re here for you. I’m an ambivert myself.

Apply now for The Midst Mastermind

If you are interested in learning more about the second cohort that starts in September 2026, please fill out this application form. We’d like to know who you are, about your professional background, and what you hope to gain from the mastermind group. If you have questions, please email me at amy@the-midst.com, and sign up for The Midst Substack newsletter to stay in the loop about our events and founder education.

Our mindset and approach

As a serial founder and former employee of successful startups, I know firsthand that entrepreneurship is not a one-size-fits-all experience. For that reason, we welcome a mix of seasoned entrepreneurs, newbies, and folks who are “quiet building” while working another job.

We also welcome solopreneurs, community leaders, product visionaries, coaches, and consultants. You will benefit most from the group if you are in the early stages of building your business, haven’t launched yet, haven’t yet reached product-market fit, or want to pivot your business.

Psychological safety and privacy is essential to The Midst Mastermind. You will join a safe, supportive circle for sharing your dreams and struggles without judgment.

FAQs

What is a mastermind group?

A mastermind group is a peer advisory group for four to eight people to meet regularly and support each other’s growth — personally, professionally, or in business.

The core idea is that the collective intelligence and experience of the group is more valuable than any one person’s advice alone. When you bring together people with different backgrounds, skills, and perspectives who are all working toward similar goals, they can help each other solve problems, spot blind spots, make better decisions, and stay accountable in ways that would be hard to do alone.

A mastermind group is different from a class or coaching program because there’s no single teacher — the wisdom comes from the group itself. It’s also different from a networking group, which tends to be more transactional and less intimate. And it’s different from a support group, which focuses more on emotional processing than forward momentum.

The best mastermind groups combine three things: honest feedback, shared accountability, and genuine connection. You’ll get a kind of “personal board of advisors” who understand your situation over time, which makes the advice much more relevant than anything you’d get from a stranger or a generic course.

Masterminds have become especially popular among entrepreneurs and business owners because running a business can be isolating, and it’s hard to get candid, informed input from employees, family, or friends who don’t truly understand what you’re navigating.

What is The Midst?

The Midst is a community-driven platform bringing together women over 40 who play by their own rules together. As a collective, we’re in the midst of life pivots, career and relationship upgrades, building businesses, peri/menopause, and more. Together, we’re shaping the messy middle into a time of growth, exploration, and possibility.

The Midst is one part media, one part professional network, one part marketing agency.

The media side of the Midst

• We publish ~half our content on the-midst.com — about the modern midlife experience, women’s health and wellness, big life changes, and personal and professional development.
• On The Midst Substack, you get exclusive content about midlife health, wellbeing, and entrepreneurship that you can’t always find on the-midst.com. We publish 2–3 primary editions of our Substack each week, including BeWell on Sundays.

What expertise does the group leader, Amy Cuevas Schroeder, bring to the mastermind?

• I’m the founder of The Midst and The Midst Substack, the community platform helping women over 40 live healthy, inspired lives on their terms. I’ve grown our reach to more than 65,000 monthly organic views, and growing every day. (That’s not including social media. You can also find us here on Instagram and here on Linkedin). The Midst is a bootstrapped, sustainable business with zero debt.
• I tend to be early to markets. I founded a magazine called Venus in my college dorm room and leaned all the way into the DIY movement in the ’90s and early 2000s. I grew the business into an internationally distributed glossy magazine before selling the company to a larger publisher in 2006. Yep, at the height of the market before everything crashed the next year.

• I was also early to marketplaces and AI startups. Between Venus and The Midst, I worked as a content strategist for Etsy, Writer AI, Minted, Atlassian AI, and Grow Therapy, and have written for TechCrunch, NYLON, Pitchfork, The Startup, West Elm, and more (see my portfolio here). As a serial contentpreneur, I specialize in creating meaningful content at scale, with thriving communities at the center.

• Before working full time for The Midst, I worked for Unusual Ventures, the Silicon Valley investment firm that funds early stage startups, including Carta, Arctic Wolf, Gusto, Harness, and Webflow. As content director, I partnered with investors like Nextdoor Co-founder Sarah Leary to produce their thought leadership content, and learned a lot about what makes startups excel.

• In addition to The Midst, I now work as a startup advisor and perimenopause market expert. I’m also an organic SEO expert and scaled The Midst organic views to 700,000 on a lean budget in 2025.

Where can I learn more about The Midst?

Read our extensive collection of content about the modern midlife experience and women’s health here on the-midst.com.

Read our free exclusive newsletter here on The Midst Substack. We send The Midst newsletter two to three times per week.

What is The Midst Founder network?

The Midst Founder network is a microcommunity on a mission to help women play by their own rules, together. We come from many walks of life, with careers ranging from a Minneapolis menopause coach to an L.A. dentist-turned-health-tech-entrepreneur to a race car driver, an attorney and feminist erotica advocate, and a longevity expert.