From IMAC Champ to RC Nation
Looking Back and Forward with Kobe Cantin.
Enthusiast. Entrepreneur. Expert RC Pilot. Kobe Cantin is all of those things and more.
Starting at a young age, fascinated with radio control !ight, he turned his passion into incredible success at various !ying contests, including the International Miniature Aerobatic Club (IMAC) Scale Aerobatic competition. He then moved on to Florida Gulf Coast University, earning an entrepreneurship degree while developing a start-up assisting businesses with getting Google reviews. Now, he’s the Community Specialist with RC Nation, taking that tight-knit community to new heights. It’s a unique RC journey and one that still has plenty of adventure on the way.
“MY RC JOURNEY IS JUST VERY UNORTHODOX.”
Cantin received his "rst radio control plane at ten years old. It was a ParkZone Ultra-Micro P-51D Mustang, which he !ew, crashed, and rebuilt several times. A couple of years later, his father bought him a ParkZone Radian, which was a bit easier to !y. Although, Cantin recalls the Radian going on an adventure of its own. Taking the Radian out to the !ying "eld of the Palm Beach RC Association, Cantin and his dad experienced what many RC pilots experience: a runaway RC plane.
“We took the Radian out there really late in the evening,” said Cantin. “It was just us, and we launched it. And we're like, ‘This is cool. We got it. We're good.’ So, it's !ying, and it just keeps on !ying. Eventually, we were really high and far, and we thought we should probably bring it down. And I don't know what happened, but it was just stuck in the strongest thermal known to man, and it just !ew out into the Everglades.”
Cantin realized he needed help and enlisted in RC pilots in and around his Florida home. Heading to the !ying "eld nearly every Sunday with his dad, Cantin “buddy-boxed,” asked questions, and made friends. His dad encouraged him but had no idea how to help him "nd planes that worked best for beginners.
“My RC journey is just very unorthodox,” said Cantin. “There was probably a three-year gap where my skills were just a lot better than the planes that I had at the time. So, I was trying to play catch up.”
“IT WAS ONE OF THE BIGGEST FACTORS IN MY LIFE...”
A trip to Joe Nall at the Triple Tree Aerodrome ignited Cantin’s interest in 3D Flying. He was lucky enough to have an RC simulator at home to try various tricks without crashing a real plane, and he’d been getting pretty good.
Cantin said, “I started on the simulator, like everybody. I watched online tutorials and things like that and just did that, but I really wanted to go to Joe Nall with my Dad. It was hyped up as this big, incredible event. So, we drove up, and I remember just going into the gates for the "rst time. It was just planes everywhere, people, RVs. It was so overwhelming and so incredible.”
Cantin could watch high-end expert 3D pilots do incredible tricks during Joe Nall. He was impressed and intimidated.
“There were just some incredible young pilots out there like Kal Reifsnyder and Evan Turner,” said Cantin. “I didn't really consider myself a good pilot at all. I just couldn’t even imagine being that good. I went home, and I started practicing, and I started getting a little bit better.”
Two years later, Cantin was on the !ight line, more con"dent in his abilities and himself. He started making friends. Cantin says it was Reifsnyder and Turner who brought him into their group of young pilots. Turner invited Cantin to Youth Masters at Triple Tree. It was a life-changing moment.
Kent Porter and Donnie Bryan put on Youth Masters with a goal of helping young pilots get excited about !ying. Youth Masters is set up so anybody under the age of 16 who can !y a plane and land and take off can go to Triple Tree and learn how to !y IMAC from mentors. Plus, they get to compete in a contest among themselves and !y the planes that were donated to the program. Cantin !ew his "rst contest at Youth Masters and it got him excited to !y bigger planes.
At Joe Nall 2016, Turner and Connor Barnes convinced Cantin to join them at the Clover Creek Aerodrome to learn to !y IMAC. It was a fantastic experience.
Cantin recalls, “John Schroeder, an absolute legend in the IMAC and RC community and just one of the most incredible people I've ever met, put on this camp for up-and-coming IMAC kids. We’d stay at Clover Creek, probably the most beautiful "eld I've ever been to, for about a month. It was 10% !ying and 90% life lessons. It was such an amazing reset.”
Looking back at that time at Clover Creek, Cantin believes the mentorship of John and his wife Tina along with David and Ashley Moser shaped him into the man he is today.
At the Nationals in July 2016, Cantin became the Sportsman National Champion, and the following year, he won the Intermediate class.
After two years of serious competition, he decided to focus on freestyle and 3D !ying. His goal was to avoid burnout from
practicing and competitions and fall back in love with the hobby. He sold his big plane and smaller foamies once he got into college.
He then pivoted to video.
Cantin said, “I started making tutorial videos on my YouTube channel. I made videos I would’ve wanted to see when I was younger. Not only do I have videos of how to do rolling harriers or how to hover, but I also have videos about how you get sponsored. I broke it down and was open and vulnerable about it. I made content I've always had questions about and then learned the answers through experience.”
“RC WOULDN'T BE RC WITHOUT THE PEOPLE IN IT.”
Before even graduating from college, he was tapped to help get a new online venture off the ground—RC Nation.
Derek Sachtleben, Digital Marketing Manager at Horizon Hobby, was looking for someone to help manage the digital community forming at RC Nation. He was aware of Cantin through his connection to large-scale 3D planes and !ying at Oshkosh, Joe Nall, and other events. Cantin’s entrepreneurial skills also put him on the radar as someone who would be good for the Community Specialist position.
“He was doing some digital marketing consulting,” Sachtleben said. “He had his own consulting "rm where he would offer his services and run paid marketing, Facebook, and Google Marketing for some smaller brands. That was something that piqued our interest. Even with him still being in school at the time, he "t the mold in a lot of ways from a digital perspective, knowing the hobby, understanding the market, and understanding the customers.”
The RC Nation community grew in its early days, but the site needed someone to help drive engagement, make content, and keep it vibrant and fun. Enter Cantin.
“My day-to-day is focusing on small wins and coming up with ideas that are maybe a little bit different,” said Cantin. “They might not work. They might work. But it's awesome to see the engagement the community brings when we do something right, or we have a cool contest or something, and it shows that there's de"nitely something there. We want it to be a place for newcomers to get information.”
One of the projects on tap includes having a place where parents can go and ask questions and talk with other parents to learn
more about radio control. Many parents want to learn more about the hobby because their children are interested but need a central location for good information. The goal is to make RC Nation a one-stop shop for help, advice, and connection.
An additional objective for RC Nation is bridging the digital and physical communities. One way to do that is to create an RC event-speci"c platform hosted and managed by RC Nation. The idea is to move people away from the various ways to do registration and have a centralized location but also treat it as a way for the RC Nation community to get involved with assistance, attendance, and even sponsorships in an organic way.
“We're going to be moving our signature event registration into this new platform,” Sachtleben said. “I call it a soft launch where we're going to launch registration for Horizon Hobby signature events through it and then piggybacking that attention and marketing to roll it out to a wider audience.”
Sachtleben has tasked Cantin with community engagement and growth, which takes various shapes and sizes. Part of his role currently is meeting with event organizers and selling the bene"ts of the registration platform and RC Nation. Cantin seems eager to get started.
“I'm focused on RC Nation and treating it as a startup because, in a way, it is,” Cantin said. “It’s been taking a lot of my time, and I'm really focused on it. RC wouldn't be RC without the people in it. I've seen incredible things on RC Nation that people have shared--their scratch builds or repainted planes or cars. A lot of people have incredible talent, and my goal is I want people to share their talent.”
