Apply for The Midst Mastermind Group
Designed for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, career explorers, and experienced professional women over 40. Now accepting general interest inquiries for Cohort 2, which will be announced later in 2026.
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 and a market valued at $24 billion.
When you’re early, you have ample time to incubate. To identify gaps, hear 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 meet collaborators, 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 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’re launching Midst Mastermind Groups.
How Midst Masterminds work
Time frame: The first cohort is April–September 2026 (applications closed on March 31, 2026). Express your interest in joining Cohort 2 here. Cohort 2 will be announced later in 2026.
Cost: TBA
Meet two times per month for 90–120 minutes each session (+ bio breaks!), on Zoom. We’ll record every session and share the recordings and transcripts with everyone.
“Hot seat” format: During each meeting, one or two members 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 they’ll take.
Between meetings, we’ll share resources and ideas via Slack and I will be on call for follow-up meetings.
We will invite subject-matter experts in entrepreneurship, visionary thinking, scaling systems and processes, and branding to attend some of the sessions.
We may time the final month (September) with an in-person meetup in Los Angeles for mastermind members and other members of The Midst community. (While you’re not required to attend, we hope you can make it!)
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 related examples here) on the-midst.com and The Midst Substack. You can select the publishing date.
What are the goals of our mastermind group?
Growth and progress: The primary goal is to help each member move forward — in their business, career, or life — faster than they would on their own. The group accelerates progress by helping members think bigger, make better decisions, and avoid costly mistakes.
Problem solving: Members bring their challenges to the group and benefit from multiple perspectives. Someone else in the room has often already faced the same problem, which saves enormous time and energy.
Accountability: One of the most powerful functions of a mastermind is holding members to their commitments. When you know you’ll be reporting 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, like-minded people raises your own sense of what’s possible. Members often leave meetings with ideas, connections, or reframes they never would have arrived at alone. The group pushes you out of your own limited perspective.
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.
The Midst Mastermind is for womyn:
over 40 (although if you’re not quite 40 and are building a business targeting women over 40, we welcome you to apply)
who are entrepreneurial or want to become more entrepreneurial — meaning 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 uncertainty, often seeing problems as opportunities to create economic, social, or cultural impact. (And if you’re introverted, we see you. I’m an ambivert myself.)
who want to make the most of their skillsets and reinvent or refresh their outlooks for the entrepreneurial age
who enjoy brainstorming, sharing ideas and insights that help others, and providing honest feedback
ideally (but not required) who offer products, services, and expertise for a target audience of women over 40
Folks who are done climbing the corporate ladder or need help stepping down from it
How to apply for The Midst Mastermind Group
If you are interested in applying for the second cohort, which will begin later in 2026, please fill out this general interest 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.
Can’t wait to hear from you!
Amy Cuevas Schroeder
Founder, The Midst
Let’s connect on Linkedin
Email me at amy@the-midst.com
Our mindset and approach
As a serial founder and serial 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, consultants, and the entrepre-curious.
Psychological safety and privacy is essential to The Midst Mastermind. I intend to foster a safe, supportive culture for sharing dreams and struggles without judgment.
FAQs
What is a mastermind group?
A mastermind group is a peer advisory group where a small number of people meet regularly to 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. Members get a kind of “personal board of advisors” who actually know their situation over time, which makes the advice much more relevant than anything you’d get from a stranger or a generic course.
They’ve 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, perimenopause, and more. Together, we’re shaping the messy middle into a time of growth, exploration, and possibility.
As a mix of media, community, professional network, and content agency, we’ve created our own ecosystem to help women-owned businesses grow.
The Midst is one part media, one part professional network, one part content 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.
We publish our exclusive free newsletter here on The Midst Substack to more than 10,000 followers.
In 2025, we generated more than 700,000 views on the-midst.com and The Midst Substack. In 2026, we are poised to reach at least 1 million organic views.
What expertise does Amy Cuevas Schroeder bring to the table?
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 has 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 micro-empire to a larger publisher in 2006. Yep, at the height of the market before everything crashed the next year.
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. 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’s funded 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.
What is The Midst Founder network?
We are 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.
This article was originally published here on the-midst.com.