The Stone Age may have inspired the diet of Hayley Mason and Bill Staley, but their entrepreneurial spirit speaks to the modern-day dream. Since 2010, the Monroeville couple has been tweaking the trendy Paleo diet, making it a little bit more palatable for the 21st century, and building a startup featuring an interactive website, a smartphone app and four cookbooks, including their latest, Make It Paleo II, released on February 17.
Getting Started
The popular “Paleo,” or Paleolithic, diet draws inspiration from the era of hunter-gatherers; its tenets include a strict rejection of dairy, grains and legumes. Meanwhile, inspired by Mark Sisson, author of The Primal Blueprint, and his blog, Mark’s Daily Apple, Mason and Staley promote a “primal” diet — one that made Mason’s weight and thyroid struggles a thing of the past.
Similarities between Paleo and primal diets include a focus on meat, fish, poultry and colorful vegetables, with occasional fruits, nuts and seeds. Both ways of eating are derived from an ancestral ideology that aims to maximize nutrients and minimize toxins. But while the Paleolithic diet opposes any foods that were not consumed before the agricultural revolution, the primal diet allows more leeway. Mason and Staley praise the incorporation of healthy fats and permit raw, fermented dairy to make the cut. They also allow for rare indulgences such as soy, red wine, white potatoes and rice.
Even tougher than sticking to a new way of eating was entering the oversaturated diet market with no business experience. When the pair launched their company, it was the middle of the Great Recession. Staley was a laid-off landscaper. Mason was a struggling makeup artist. They turned to the Internet, and with only a quality camera and a love for cooking created a blog. That blog caught a publishing company’s eye seven months after its inception.
“We were serious,” recalls Staley. “We set up a schedule for posting recipes. We bought a professional camera, and we were working hard for the best quality photos. We didn’t have a huge audience at that point, but we still acted like we had a million people a month.”
When the offer came from Victory Belt Publishing, Staley and Mason dropped their freelance jobs, channeling all their energy into their first cookbook and its 215 recipes. Make It Paleo, spanning nearly 450 pages, was finished in six months and published in 2011. It featured beloved foods ranging from lo mein to carrot cake. The idea was simple: take meals that they’ve always enjoyed and make them Paleo.
Where Life and Work Meet
Of course, making it Paleo is far from easy. Staley and Mason perform a balancing act as a young couple making a home and a business all at once. Their relationship, built upon a shared appetite for healthy eating, morphed into a business partnership early on. The rollercoaster ride of the first cookbook, first website and first app has been concurrent with other landmarks of life, like marriage and moving in together. Naturally, one of the biggest issues is time management.
“Our entire life sort of overlaps with our work,” says Mason. “There’s always something that can be done. Our workday is never over. It’s a 24/7 job.”
After building a massive Internet domain, the couple now has to work to unplug. Between the blog, Instagram, Facebook and email, it’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of promotion and social media. Staley and Mason are striving to create more structure in their lives, to separate work from play, and to find a few hours to bake some grain-free cupcakes — not for the website or a cookbook, but just for themselves.
When it comes to the division of labor, Mason typically manages recipe development, while Staley covers photography. But the lines blur. Recently, Staley appeared in a video to launch a Primal Palate giveaway so Mason operated the camera. And Staley often pitches ideas for entrees or desserts. The duo stresses the importance of wearing multiple hats.
“Having a startup, costs can get out of control really quickly,” explains Staley. “It was important to learn skills earlier on to control our costs.”
To that end, the pair built the first Primal Palate website themselves, only employing a web developer years later. Most of the outside contributors are part-time designers and developers, involved on a contract basis. Ultimately, the Primal Palate workforce includes a business partner and key consultants, with Staley and Mason always at the endeavor’s core. ?The couple’s self-sufficiency enables them to keep costs low and to keep Primal Palate on a clearly defined path.
“We’ve both loved cooking our entire lives, but we're self-taught entrepreneurs,” says Staley.
Unpacking Primal Popularity
So who’s following the couple down this path in pursuit of healthy living? PrimalPalate.com receives over 600,000 page views per month. Up to 200 site users regularly contribute recipes, which are curated based on the ingredients. Staley and Mason’s myKitchen app has been downloaded at least 150,000 times. The days spent cooking and photographing from sunup to sundown — then editing photos and recipe documents into the wee hours of the night — are paying off.
Staley and Mason also remains attentive to the desires of their readers. For their newest cookbook, Make it Paleo II, the couple sought input from Mason’s sister, Caitlin Nagelson, a fellow foodie with trained experience as a sous chef at a Japanese restaurant.
“A lot of fans had asked for more Asian recipes, and I focus a lot on Asian and Japanese cuisine,” explains Nagelson.
One the reason people love Primal Palate is because of the couple's personal background. Behind the paleo promotion is the story of an eating philosophy that steadied Mason’s weight and calmed her thyroid. The diet echoes the couple’s commitment to high-quality real food, and their belief that everyone has the potential to live a better life.
“Marketing and selling ourselves never comes naturally,” insists Staley. “We’re focused on creating.”
Their minimalist website is devoid of advertisements. The app is free. The business owners collect revenue from the sale of cookbooks, eBooks, t-shirts and grain-free cookie dough, but the emphasis is always on the food. They relish seeing people making their recipes. They love hearing about how gluten-free treats saved a child’s birthday party or how their personal meal planner helped a mom shed a few pounds. Staley and Mason don’t simply want to sell a diet: they want to encourage a lifestyle.
Primal Palate’s website and cookbooks offer that valuable dieting luxury of one-part nutritionist, one-part cheerleader. In the future, Mason and Staley hope the focus will shift from books to community building online. The startup draws much of its appeal from its role as a wise, wholesome friend. It is there to pick you up with chia seed pudding if you fall off the wagon, and it’s there to revel in dieting victories with a congratulatory blog post.