“So are you suggesting I just set my own Amazon mastermind group up?”

Absolutely, you can. I’ve set up my own Amazon mastermind myself, as I mentioned earlier.

Here’s the thing - it’s really hard work. If I were just selling on Amazon, rather than also running a podcast and coaching, I simply wouldn’t do it all again. I’d just plug into an existing group.

But, if you want to create something from scratch, I can give you a ton of reality checks form from personal experience:

Finding new Amazon seller peers for your Amazon mastermind

Firstly, and most importantly, you’ve got to gather together a set of people who are worth being peers with in an Amazon group in the first place.

When I first started out on Amazon, and formed my own peer group of Amazon sellers, I looked through the Facebook group of a course that I was in, and searched for people who lived in or near me (in London). I then tried to check out what they had been posting, to see how active they were, whether they were moving forward with the process, etc.

That took a lot of time and effort. Trouble is, that was just a beginning!

Think about it.

Facebook Groups aka "The tyre kickers' Club"

There are a lot of people out on the Facebook groups, even within paid courses, who don’t have enough money, don’t have enough time, and don’t have the right attitude.

They hope they can make some money on Amazon. They’ve often been pitched into the idea that they can easily replace the day job within 3 months (if that’s you.

Sure, it happens- but it’s pretty rare. Sorry to burst your balloon. It’s not a business-like attitude. It’s based on hope. Which, as we all know, is not a strategy…).

What I’ve just described sounds, in fact, like a typical Facebook group of Amazon wannapreneurs.

Which is why my first effort to create a little Amazon mastermind faltered. I had found a bunch of would-be Amazon sellers who lived in London and posted a bit online. Not surprisingly, most of them proved to be very much non-action-takers, and the meetings ended up being people fantasising about starting a business, instead of doing it!

Filtering out the tyre-kickers

What you need is a filtering system. And, guess what, that takes time and effort to build. What I do these days for the masterminds for Amazon sellers that I run (through Amazing FBA) is have an application process for each Amazon mastermind.

I ask every single applicant to fill in a form with questions that I’ve honed over a year of working this process. Then in some cases (all cases, for applicants to my $10K Collective Amazon mastermind ), I have a 20-30 minute interview in which I ask detailed questions.

Why bother? Well, see above. What happens to you if you create (with some effort) a peer group of  under-capitalized, time-poor un-focussed people? Oh yeah…

Finding people to put through your filter

Of course, if you are going to filter people out, you need a way of finding possible people in the first place. If you’re going to manually do that, you need to be going to a lot of physical meet ups and other big groups.

That’s great, but there aren’t a whole lot of good ones in the UK. There’s a fantastic Amazon meetup in London once a month, run by the excellent Andy Geldman of Webretailer. Then there are various other meet up groups, some of which might be good, but many of which, I suspect, are run by wannabes not business owners.

Finding an Amazon mastermind meeting venue

Once you’ve gathered your troops, you’ve got to find a suitable venue for your Amazon mee...