Jimenez Julien, the person behind MastermindSeats

Founder and product lead, MLJ, SASU. Reachable at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.

Why I built a tool for paid mastermind rooms

I did not set out to build coaching software. I was helping a friend reconcile the books of a group coaching practice that ran three cohorts of women founders, and I spent two days matching payment notifications to a spreadsheet of member names. Four seats had gone unbilled for months. Two members had been paying after they had already left. The facilitator, who is very good at her actual job, had been carrying an accounting workload she never agreed to and had never priced into her fee.

What struck me was not the money. It was that the record of the room itself did not exist anywhere. Who had taken a hot seat and when. Who had missed four sessions in a row. What each member had committed to at the last meeting. All of it lived in memory, in a notebook, or in a chat thread that nobody could search. The intimacy of a small mastermind is exactly what makes it valuable, and it is also exactly why nobody writes anything down.

MastermindSeats came out of that. The design rule from the first sketch was that the facilitator should never be asked to become an administrator, and the member should never be shown a scoreboard. The seat ledger, the rotation engine, the check in form and the attendance history are four small things that together remove almost all of the invisible labor around a paid room without changing what happens inside it.

What I learned about this trade

Three things, repeatedly. First, coaches undercharge for group work because they price the session and not the year of holding it together. Second, the member who stops showing up rarely announces it; she simply misses one meeting, then two, and by the time renewal arrives the decision has already been made without anyone in the room noticing. Third, facilitators resist software not because they are technically shy but because most of it is built for course delivery, where the unit is a video, rather than for a room, where the unit is a chair.

So the vocabulary of this product is seats, rooms, rotations and terms. If a screen ever starts talking about students, modules or funnels, someone has taken a wrong turn and I want to hear about it.

How I work with the coaches who use it

Small and direct. When you request a walkthrough, you get me on a call with your real member list open, not a sales representative reading a script. I ask what your billing day is, how you currently decide the hot seat order, and what you do when a card fails. Half the time the answer to the third question is a small confession, and that is fine, because that is the exact problem the tool exists to remove. Roughly one call in six ends with me saying the product is not a fit, usually because the room is free, or too large to be a mastermind, or already running well inside a system the coach has no reason to leave.

Experience and expertise

• Fifteen years building and running subscription billing systems for small businesses, including recurring charge recovery and dunning workflows.
• Direct operational work with group coaching practices in the United States and Europe on seat pricing, term structure and member retention.
• Publisher of MastermindSeats through MLJ, SASU, responsible for the product roadmap, the data protection posture and every word on this site.
• Hands on support: I read every demo request and reply within one business day, Monday through Friday.

How this product is built and maintained

Product decisions come from support conversations and from watching real cohort cycles, not from feature request voting. Anything that touches money is shipped behind a flag and tested against live billing cycles in a sandbox before it reaches a customer account. We publish a changelog inside the app for every release that changes behavior a member can see. Editorially, every number on this site comes from aggregate platform data or from customers who agreed in writing to be quoted by name, and any figure we cannot substantiate is removed rather than softened. No article, page or testimonial here is generated to fill space, and no claim about security or data handling appears unless it describes what the system actually does today.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com with a question about a cohort setup, an invoice, a data request or a correction to something published here. If you would prefer to book time, the walkthrough form on the home page reaches the same inbox.

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