17 best mastermind groups for entrepreneurs. What they cost, who they're for, and how to choose.

Most founders do not go looking for a mastermind group because they want to network. They go looking because they are carrying every decision alone. You have people around you. A co-founder buried in the product, a partner whose eyes glaze over when you talk shop, a ChatGPT tab open at 1am. None of them can tell you the thing you are building is off. That is the gap a mastermind fills: a small room of people at your level who will.

This is a guide to the best business masterminds and entrepreneur masterminds in 2026, written by someone who runs a marketplace of 750+ vetted operators and has watched this exact search play out tens of thousands of times. I will be honest about which rooms are worth the money, including my own.

Start with what you are buying.

What is a mastermind group?

A mastermind group is a small group of peers, usually six to twelve people, who meet regularly to help each other solve problems, make better decisions, and stay accountable to what they said they would do. It is peer to peer, a room of people at roughly your level rather than a teacher at the front.

The idea is old. Napoleon Hill named it in 1925 in The Law of Success and again in his 1937 book Think and Grow Rich, describing a coordination of knowledge and effort between people working toward a definite purpose. The modern version runs on the same machinery: a handful of people who understand your work, meeting on a schedule, telling each other the truth.

It helps to separate it from its neighbors. Coaching has one expert guiding the room; a mastermind is peer to peer. A conference or a one-off call ends when it ends; a mastermind recurs, with the same people, who remember what you committed to last time. Mentoring and advising bring in someone further along; a mastermind is a room of equals wrestling with the same size of problem. The whole point is people who will challenge you because they are in the same fight.

If what you want is one person further along rather than a room of equals, that is a mentor, and we cover that in our guide to entrepreneur mentorship.

How a mastermind group works

The mechanics are simple, and the simplicity is the point.

That last part is the engine. The operators who coach this for a living keep coming back to the same move: turn a vague intention into a time-bound commitment that someone witnesses. A mastermind is a machine for doing that on a schedule, which is exactly what a solo founder loses the day they stop having a boss.

Who masterminds are for (and who they're not)

If you are a solo founder or the only person doing your job, you already know the specific version of alone this solves. No boss, so nothing has a real deadline. No peer who gets the work, so every call happens inside your own head. Founders often describe wanting a virtual boss, someone who hands them a deadline so they follow through. A mastermind is that, plus a reality check you cannot give yourself because you are too close to your own company.

What do mastermind groups cost?

Mastermind group cost runs across three orders of magnitude, from free peer pods to six figures a year, and the number tells you less than you would hope. Here is the honest spread in 2026.

What you are paying for is fit and accountability, not access to information. For a lot of founders, a single vetted operator costs a fraction of an elite room and answers the exact question keeping them up. We go deeper on that math in what a business mentor costs.

Online vs in-person masterminds

In-person still has something online cannot fake. A retreat, a dinner, a room you flew to, all raise the stakes and the trust. That is part of what the premium groups are selling, and for some founders it is worth the travel and the price.

But online has closed most of the gap, and for one reason that matters more than the rest: it lets you sit in a room of true peers instead of whoever happens to live nearby. The best online mastermind groups on this list lean into that. MicroConf matches bootstrapped SaaS founders into online pods, Mindvalley Business Mastery runs weekly online calls, and GrowthMentor is online 1:1 by design. A bootstrapped founder in a mid-size city will find better peers in a matched online pod than in any local group. If you want the always-on, one-to-one version of that, we compared the best online mentoring platforms separately.

"Mastermind groups near me": the honest answer

If you are searching for a mastermind group near you, here is the straight answer. The big membership organizations on this list, EO, Vistage, YPO, and BNI, run local chapters in cities worldwide, so near me usually means find the nearest chapter. That is a real option and a good one if a strong chapter exists where you are.

The harder truth is that proximity matters less than it used to. A group of six people at your exact stage, met over video, will usually out-help a local group you joined mainly because it was close. Geography was worth optimizing for when the only option was driving to a hotel conference room. It stopped being the constraint a while ago. If what you want is a broad room to belong to rather than a tight accountability pod, that is a community, and we keep current lists of the best founder communities and the best marketing communities if marketing is your world.

Skip the waitlist. Talk to the right operator this week.

A mastermind locks you into one room for a year. GrowthMentor gives you a different vetted founder or operator for every problem. One membership, unlimited 1:1 calls, every mentor included.

Talk to a mentor

GrowthMentor

Full disclosure, this one is mine, and it is not a mastermind in the classic sense. GrowthMentor runs City Squads, small local groups of founders and marketers who meet in Slack and in person to swap local opportunities and help each other grow. But the part most members lean on is the on-demand one: book a 1:1 with a vetted founder or operator who has already solved the thing in front of you.

We ran traditional group masterminds for years. The honest feedback was that members preferred the 1:1 calls and the always-on Slack to a fixed group slot, so that is what we lean into. No cohort to wait for, no five-figure check, a different room for every problem on the day you have it.

A premium mastermind also sells you the part that happens in person: the retreat, the annual room you fly to. We have a version of that, without the locked cohort. Our #IRL events pull members together offline, on the bet that as everything goes AI, the people worth knowing are the ones who still show up. And every September we fly our most-reviewed mentors to Greece for the Midas Trip, four years running, more than fifty mentors flown so far. It is the clearest sign the community behind the calls is a real one.

Hampton

The defining founder mastermind of this era, run by Sam Parr of The Hustle. The catch is the door. A $3M revenue floor (or a $3M raise, or a prior $10M exit) and a city-chapter rule lock out most people who go looking for a mastermind list in the first place.

Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO)

Built for real million-dollar owner-operators, and its forums run on a strict rule that defines the whole experience: members speak only from their own experience and never give advice. Founders tend to love that protocol or find it rigid. If you are below the revenue gate, or you want a teacher rather than a room of equals, it is not your group.

Young Presidents' Organization (YPO)

The elite tier with the steepest eligibility bar on this list. If you are not running a company of real scale by your mid-40s you will not qualify, and even then the value rides on your specific chapter.

Vistage

You are paying premium dues mainly for your assigned Chair and the other CEOs in the room. Vet the specific local group first, because a weak Chair makes the price hard to justify.

Genius Network

Real and well run for founders who want proximity and connections over tactics. At $25,000 to $100,000 you are buying the room and Joe Polish's rolodex, not a curriculum.

Strategic Coach

You are buying Dan Sullivan's frameworks and a quarterly workshop rhythm, not an intimate peer group. It suits founders who want a system and a teacher more than a room of equals.

Scaling Up (CEO Bootcamp)

Less a peer room than Verne Harnish's operating system: the one-page Rockefeller Habits plan, quarterly priorities, and a weekly meeting rhythm, run through a network of certified coaches. It fits CEOs who want a repeatable system and will bore a founder chasing a high-status room.

Russell Brunson's Inner Circle

Legit if you live in the ClickFunnels and info-marketing world and want Brunson's playbook at scale. The revenue gates and price make it a closed club for people already winning.

Mastermind Talks (MMT)

Alive and famous for curation and real relationships over business tactics. The multi-year waitlist and invite gate make it nearly impossible to simply buy your way in.

The Collective Mastermind (Greg Cassar)

A solid mid-market option for Australian and APAC operators who want hands-on marketing help. It is regional, and the broadened health-and-longevity scope can dilute the pure marketing focus.

MicroConf Masterminds

The cleanest pure-play for bootstrapped software founders, and the lowest barrier on this list. You pay once to get matched into a group, and the quality depends entirely on the peers you land with.

Pavilion

A strong community, but it is built for revenue and go-to-market executives inside companies rather than founders running their own, so it sits at the edge of a founder-mastermind list.

Elite Entrepreneur Mastermind (Chris Harder)

A real tiered founder mastermind from Chris and Lori Harder. The Elite tier hides its price behind an application, so expect a premium five-figure ask.

Mindvalley Business Mastery

A legitimate founder mastermind led by Vishen Lakhiani, who bootstrapped Mindvalley past $100M. The mindset and personal-growth framing is heavy, so it fits if you want that alongside the tactics and grates if you came for pure operating advice.

The Visionary Collective (Natalie MacNeil)

A genuine high-revenue women's founder room. It leans hard into futurist and embodied-leadership framing, so it is not a nuts-and-bolts tactical mastermind.

Business Network International (BNI)

This is referral networking, not a peer-advisory mastermind, so it earns a spot only if you accept that the real cost is your weekly time and the payoff is leads rather than strategic counsel.

Why most masterminds fail (and how to pick one that won't)

A mastermind is only as good as the room, and most rooms break in one of three predictable ways. I asked the operators on GrowthMentor who coach founders through this for a living what they see most, and the answers were consistent.

The first is the wrong cohort. One described a bootstrapped, profitable founder running an informal mastermind that fell apart because the room was a mix of one bootstrapper, several venture-backed companies, and a couple of agency consultants. The incentives did not match, so the challenges did not land. A room only pressure-tests you well when the people in it understand the constraints you are actually under.

The second is no real safety. Another described a seven-person startup mastermind where everyone performed success, minimized their problems, and protected their image, which meant nobody ever brought the real thing they were stuck on. If the room never sees a real problem, it cannot help with one.

The third one is on you. The most common pattern these coaches name is the founder who uses the room to be reassured instead of challenged, arriving already leaning toward an answer and steering the conversation to confirm it. A good room will not let you do that. A weak one will tell you what you want to hear and send you off feeling better and no wiser.

The mastermind alternative: one honest outside read

There is a version of this that does not require joining a fixed room for a year. The reason a mastermind works is not the membership. It is that you stop trying to build a company entirely inside your own head and get an honest outside read from someone who has been where you are. Across tens of thousands of mentor sessions, the pattern is hard to miss: the problem is rarely a skills gap. It is isolation, and isolation is a sourcing problem you can solve.

AI sharpened the isolation instead of fixing it. Founders now keep a ChatGPT tab open at 1am as the stand-in for the peer they do not have. AI can do an enormous amount of the doing, but it cannot be the room. It will not tell you the thing you are building is off, because it has no stake in whether you are right.

This is what it looks like instead of a fixed cohort. Book a 1:1 with whoever has already solved the thing in front of you, as many as it takes. One membership, every mentor included.

Your bookings

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Vassilena Valchanova

Pivot or persevere · Tue 10:00

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Michael Taylor

Accountability and follow-through · Tue 1:00

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Kosta Panagoulias

Pricing with confidence · Wed 9:30

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Tina Louise

The first key hire · Thu 11:00

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Daniel Johnson

Beating the overwhelm · Fri 2:00

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6 calls this monthadded to your bill: $0

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Vassia Sarantopoulou runs a company called AntiLoneliness. Here is what changed for her once she stopped going it alone.

"The biggest impact that GrowthMentor has had in my life is the confidence that I feel in regard to challenges that will come my way as a solo entrepreneur. I know now that there will be someone to discuss and help me find solutions. I am not alone anymore."

Vassia Sarantopoulou · Solo Founder at AntiLoneliness

Read Vassia's story

When to ask for help (and what to ask for)

You do not need a whole mastermind to get unstuck on a specific thing. When a decision is keeping you up, the move is to bring it to one person who has already crossed it, with the real context and the worry underneath it. A few of the operators on GrowthMentor coach the exact things a mastermind is supposed to deliver. Our guide to finding a startup mentor covers how to reach out so they reply.

Suggested mentors

Four vetted operators who coach accountability, isolation, and the decisions you cannot make alone:

Zev Asch

Building the accountability structure you lose the day you stop having a boss

Book a call

Spyros Tsoukalas

Solo-founder focus systems and an honest read on what to build next

Book a call

Alex Perelman

Founder coach, twice through Y Combinator, for the lonely high-stakes calls

Book a call

Sofia Papoutsi, PhD

Burnout-aware systems for founders carrying the whole thing alone

Book a call

Whichever way you go, the move is the same. Stop building the company entirely in your own head, and keep one honest outside read close.

Founders who stopped trying to figure it out alone

Before you buy into one room for a year,
talk to someone who's already in yours.

You've got people. You don't have peers. Talk it through with a vetted operator who has already been where you are. One membership, unlimited 1:1 calls, every mentor included.

Talk to a mentor