In August 2008, Mike Lantz had a small gift for the Warrior Forum: the ability to buy somebody a beer. No bartender was involved. He was working on a project that needed PayPal integration, and along the way he brought back a forum tipping feature, free for members. A month later came the more commercial announcement: WSO Pro, a service designed to make selling Warrior Special Offers easier. The beer button had been a useful detour.
There is something pleasingly ordinary about that sequence. Internet marketing is fond of the grand unveiling, preferably accompanied by a countdown clock. Here was a programmer explaining what he had been working on, releasing a handy piece of it, then returning with the larger product. People were already gathering, talking and trading. Lantz was making the machinery fit their habits.
He founded WarriorPlus in 2006. Two decades later, he remains its founder and CEO. The company connects sellers of digital products with affiliates who promote those products for a commission. Behind the courses, ebooks and software sits a less glamorous collection of tasks: taking payment, tracking referrals, distributing commissions and helping people find what they bought. Those tasks have provided Lantz with a remarkably durable occupation.
A programmer among the pitchmen
Lantz came to the business through programming. He studied at Brigham Young University between 2000 and 2003, and has described computer science and web development as his original trade. Entrepreneurship appealed to him early. After college and work as a developer, he wanted to make something of his own that other people could use.
His public description of himself contains a little more personality than the usual executive biography: “Digital Marketer who loves all things geek!” The exclamation mark seems well earned by the subject matter. This is a career in which an improvement to a payment workflow can count as an exciting afternoon. For somebody whose sale depends on that workflow, it certainly does.
An early piece of the business connected PayPal with sales pages through a buy button. That practical starting point helps explain the company he built. A seller may know how to write a useful guide or create software, yet still need help turning interest into an order. A promoter needs a dependable record of referrals. Lantz worked in the space where those separate needs meet.
Four announcements, one busy summer
The summer of 2008 offers a compact view of how he worked. On August 6, he told members he was updating the WSO Tracker for the new forum, while preserving the old offers’ archives and statistics. On August 20, he announced a notification service after roughly a week of testing. Two days later came the tipping feature. On September 29, he introduced WSO Pro.
Each addressed a recognisable inconvenience. Tracking helped people follow offers. Notifications reduced the work of checking for something new. Payment integration helped the seller complete a transaction. Taken together, the announcements show a business growing through additions to a community’s daily routine. There was already a market; there were also plenty of loose ends.
Even the promise to preserve old statistics matters. An archive is useful to the person who has accumulated it, and moving a forum should not make that history disappear. Lantz’s note was brief, but it dealt with continuity as well as novelty. The new feature gets the announcement. Keeping the old information intact is what saves somebody’s afternoon.
The trouble with a familiar name
WarriorPlus and the Warrior Forum were separate businesses. That distinction became a recurring subject of conversation because the names made an association seem natural. Lantz built services used by forum sellers; he did not thereby become the owner of the forum. A shared vocabulary can be convenient for a young business and a recurring explanation for an older one.
His WSO of the Day project put him in another position: choosing an offer and helping it reach buyers. It added an editorial decision to the technical work. Attention is valuable in a crowded marketplace, and a featured product can bring its creator an audience that a payment button alone cannot supply. Selection also brings questions about who chose, who benefits and whose rules apply.
At the turn of 2010, Lantz responded publicly to a dispute about the promotion. He explained that the arrangement involved a joint venture with the product creator and announced a temporary pause while the issues were addressed. He also thanked Allen Says for creating and maintaining the forum. The episode captures the negotiations that come with building a business close to somebody else’s community.
The practical lesson is easy to miss among the terminology. A feature can work technically and still need reconsideration because people understand it differently. WSO Pro, WarriorPlus, Warrior Forum: the names were close enough to require patient explanation. Software may execute precisely. Its audience reserves the right to be confused.
By 2014, Lantz also appeared in the programme for the Warrior Event in Raleigh, North Carolina. The recorded event listed him on a second-day expert panel with Eric Louviere, Wes Harrison, Mike Filsaime, Omar Martin and Lina Trivedi. It places the programmer among the people whose businesses used the same marketing networks. The panel listing is a reminder that this trade had a life away from the screen, too. The names attached to offers and software could become people in a room, with the opportunity to talk about how the business actually worked.
A marketplace has more than one customer
The business eventually extended beyond those early forum services. By 2016, Rob Cornish was discussing Lantz’s decision to retire older features, including forum integration. The toolmaker had built something with a life beyond the place where many people first encountered it. Retiring a familiar feature is its own kind of product decision, with fewer celebratory exclamation marks.
Today, the platform’s basic arrangement still puts three parties in the same transaction. A vendor owns a digital product. An approved affiliate promotes it. A buyer purchases it. The seller remains responsible for the product’s delivery and support. One person can participate as both a vendor and an affiliate, which makes the relationships more interesting than a simple line from shopkeeper to customer.
For Lantz, that structure means the machinery and the behaviour of the people using it remain intertwined. Helping a seller attract attention also means handling the consequences when a buyer’s expectations are disappointed. The company has to manage the selling process while individual businesses stand behind the goods. A marketplace cannot finish its work merely by making the button clickable.
Owns the product and supports the buyer.
Refers a buyer and earns a commission.
Buys the digital product from its vendor.
WarriorPlus lists its standard vendor fee as 4.9 percent plus ten cents per transaction in its January 2026 fee guidance. Accounts and product listings are free. The commercial arrangement ties the platform’s fee to a completed sale. It is a tidy expression of the original proposition: provide the tools around the transaction, and earn something when those tools help a transaction happen.
The support ticket that became a partnership
A more personal account of Lantz emerges from Shane Nathan, who became WarriorPlus’s general manager. Nathan had been selling through the platform when a fault prevented customers from receiving one of his products. He placed the incident around 2013 or 2014. The problem eventually reached Lantz, and their first conversation took place over Skype.
In Nathan’s telling, Lantz fixed the issue and refunded fees in an amount Nathan had not expected. That response led to further conversations about helping with the business. The working relationship took months to come together. Nathan subsequently took on operations, marketing and relationships with vendors and affiliates, gradually assuming work the founder had been doing himself.
It is an unusually useful hiring story because it begins with a dissatisfied customer and a broken process. Nathan already understood the marketplace from the selling side. Lantz got to see somebody who knew its problems at close range. A support queue rarely advertises itself as a recruitment department, but this one produced a future general manager.
“I really need help at WarriorPlus.”
Mike Lantz, as recalled by Shane Nathan
Making room to step back
Nathan also described a personal objective behind the delegation: Lantz wanted more freedom and less involvement in the daily work. That gives the partnership a second dimension. The founder who had supplied useful systems to other entrepreneurs was allowing somebody else to help organise his own working life. Trust had become as consequential as technical competence.
There is a particular difficulty in handing over tasks you have done for years. Knowing exactly how to do something can make it harder to let somebody else begin. Nathan’s account describes a gradual transfer, with responsibilities accumulating over time. The scale of the company is only part of this story; the allocation of the founder’s attention is another.
His stated interest in marketplaces has a similarly personal purpose: letting people share knowledge and expertise while earning a living. It suits a programmer who found a business among people making and selling digital products. There is no requirement that everybody become a developer. The point of supplying the infrastructure is to let other people concentrate on what they know.
Return to that little beer feature and the shape of the career becomes easier to see. There was a group of people, a way they wanted to interact, and some code that could make it happen. The later work added commercial obligations, public arguments and colleagues with responsibilities of their own. Lantz kept building around the transaction. Eventually, he began making more room around himself.