The main challenge is that the SDKs are pretty similar across programming languages, and they're not super flexible. They might not support certain use cases. It has a set of functions that work well if they fit your needs, but if you need something custom, you can't rely on the SDKs and have to use recipes. And using those recipes extensively isn't ideal. For example, we were getting leads from the D2C application, sending them to Segment, and then from Segment to HubSpot. If Segment could mimic HubSpot's API, we could leverage HubSpot's SDK capabilities even through Segment. But Segment's API is generic, so it doesn't do anything tailored to HubSpot. As a product designer, I know that would be hard to accomplish anyway. It's not a criticism, because I would probably design it the same way. But as a consumer, I don't care how it's designed; I care if it fits my use case. If not, how much effort will it take to make it work? That was the challenging part. It took a lot of time to integrate Segment and make it communicate with HubSpot in a certain way. So, the challenge is the lack of flexibility in the SDKs, given the capabilities of the destinations. From my experience, it's mostly fine. It could benefit from more customization capabilities. The product itself is good, but it would be awesome if it allowed you to write your own extensions to augment the CDP's capabilities. And another suggestion. It's not about a missing feature, but rather something Segment is doing that I personally don't think a CDP should do. It's like a mobile phone you use for watching videos, listening to music, and making calls. But to be a good mobile phone, you need to be the best at making and receiving calls, and texting. Everything else is a distraction. Instead of optimizing for those distractions, you should solidify the basics. To illustrate this, Segment has many capabilities that overlap with things like CRMs, campaign management systems, tracking systems, and so on. These capabilities can give a small startup a real kick-start, but as you scale, the capabilities other than the core CDP features don't scale as well. For example, it does campaign management, but it's not really a full-fledged campaign management system. When you're starting out, it's fine, it's great, it fits almost all your use cases. But as you grow from a two-person organization to a 300-person organization, you'll have to deal with more complexity. You'll likely need to look for a dedicated campaign management system and integrate it with Segment. Now, if you've been using Segment's campaign management for a long time, moving that part to a different system will be a roadblock.
