Stefan Wiskemann, Founder of 21Publish and a great friend and mentor of mine has finally agreed to reply to my interview requests. And off we go:

Disclosure: I'm an investor in 21Publish and Stefan is an investor in Creative Weblogging as well.

1) What does 21Publish do?

21Publish is a multi-user blogging solution that makes it easy to offer private-labeled blogs to customers, team-mates or like-minded people. It's a web-based solution so there is nothing to install or maintain. Almost like starting a personal blog on a hosted service like blogger.com, 21Publish allows you to create a BlogPortal with an unlimited number of blogs for your community.




2) What did you do before 21Publish?

Prior to 21Publish I co-founded myblog/20six which runs blogging communities in Europe including www.myblog.dewhich is the largest blogging community in Germany. Before that, I was one of the co-founders of ricardo.de, a European
Internet Auction Company that was later on merged with our British competitor QXL.

3) 21Publish seems to address a marketplace that has become crowded with an indistinguishable number of blog software providers. How does 21Publish compete? Why have the actual customers chosen 21Publish?

Most providers address the market for personal blogs while we do a hosted multi-user blogging application. If someone wants just a personal blog 21Publish is certainly not the right kind of service.

But if you have more than 3 or 4 others you want to have in your blogging community I believe there is no other service as flexible and at the same time easy and inexpensive as 21Publish. Take the example of www.marmablogs.com. It is the blogging community of www.marmaladya.com a small online publisher addressing a female readership. For only $20/month
they have added a blogging community to their website. It not only allows them to offer blogs to their readers. Furthermore, readers can add an existing blog by submitting their RSS feed.

Finally, we have a free entry level. Therefore, instead of Renting a server and installing software you can just start such thing in minutes on 21Publish. It is hosted, maintained and it's free.

4) 21Publish recently launched a new version of it's free blog community service. Does this change the picture?

The latest release brought two major improvements. We have worked a lot on the user interface that many people found clumsy and difficult before. The feedback we get now is very positive.

The other improvement concerns the integration of external blogs. We have learned that in many cases people already have a blog and refrain from maintaining an additional blog. That is why we now offer to sign up your existing blog. All you have to do is to type in your blog address and the feed will be auto-discovered. For instance, if you are a group of alumni from a certain college it is now very easy to keep track of everyone by adding the feeds of already existing blogs and offer new blogs to those who do not already have one.

5) Which plans do you have for the company?

We have just launched 21Classes (www.21classes.com) a new service for teachers. Over the course of last year we have seen more and more teachers setting up Classroom BlogPortals for their students with the possibility for each student to set up an individual blog. On top of the existing product 21Classes offers advanced privacy settings as well as review capabilities of student entries that enable teachers to check entries and/or comments before they get published.




We have had very positive reviews for this new product by edubloggers and we will certainly continue to launch new products like this.

6) What are your plans as an entrepreneur?

Besides working on 21Publish I have started to invest in start-ups, mostly together with my partners Stefan and Christoph with whom I co-founded ricardo. Some of these companies are very promising such as last.fm, or kinkaa, or - of course - Creative Weblogging. It is a fun thing to do and I hope that I can leverage some of my experience this way.