Skip to main content

Hippo Best Practices

Maximize answer quality while achieving 80% cost reduction with these proven strategies.

Document Preparation

Upload High-Quality Documents

Prefer: Text-based PDFs (created from Word, Google Docs, etc.) Avoid: Scanned/image PDFs (OCR quality varies)
Impact: 30-40% better accuracy with text-based PDFs
Before uploading, remove:
  • Cover pages and blank pages
  • Table of contents (unless needed for answers)
  • Advertisements and promotional material
  • Appendices with irrelevant data
Impact: Faster processing + less noise in answers
Good formatting:
  • Clear headings and structure
  • Proper paragraph breaks
  • Readable fonts (not decorative)
  • Logical document flow
Bad formatting:
  • All-caps text
  • Excessive formatting
  • Broken layouts
  • Mixed languages without context
Impact: Better chunk quality → Better retrieval

Folder Organization

Strategic Document Grouping

Related Content Together

✅ Good: All product docs in one folder
Impact: Better cross-document answers

Separate Unrelated Content

✅ Good: Separate folders for different products
❌ Bad: Mix all products in one folderImpact: Reduced confusion, better precision

Folder Size Sweet Spot

Recommendation: 20-100 related documents per folder for best results

Question Optimization

Write Clear, Specific Questions

✅ Good:
  • “What is the API rate limit for Pro plan users?”
  • “What is the refund window for digital products?”
  • “What authentication methods does the API support?”
❌ Bad:
  • “Tell me about limits”
  • “Refunds?”
  • “Auth”
Impact: 2-3x better answer relevance

Leverage Follow-Up Questions

Impact: Natural conversation flow → Better understanding

Performance Optimization

Use Async for Scale

Impact: 5-10x faster batch operations
Impact: 3-5x faster for multiple independent questions

Cost Optimization

Maximize the 80% Savings

Upload Once, Query Many

Impact: Amortize upload cost over many queries

Reuse Chats When Appropriate

Impact: Maintain context, reduce overhead

Precision Retrieval Benefits

Hippo automatically retrieves only relevant chunks:

Answer Quality

Verify with Confidence Scores

Use Source Citations

Maintenance & Monitoring

Regular Cleanup

Monitor Usage

Production Checklist

  • Use environment variables for API keys
  • Never commit API keys to version control
  • Implement user-specific chat isolation
  • Delete sensitive data when no longer needed
  • Review uploaded documents for PII/sensitive data
  • Use async API for production workloads
  • Implement connection pooling
  • Add retry logic for failed requests
  • Cache frequently asked questions if appropriate
  • Monitor response times
  • Track answer confidence scores
  • Monitor API usage and costs
  • Log low-confidence answers for review
  • Set up alerts for errors
  • Review source citations quality
  • Document folder organization strategy
  • Keep inventory of uploaded documents
  • Document common questions and answers
  • Maintain change log for document updates
  • Create runbooks for common operations

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Don’t:
  • Mix unrelated documents in one folder
  • Use vague question phrasing
  • Ignore confidence scores
  • Upload scanned PDFs without OCR
  • Create new chats for every question
  • Forget to clean up test resources
  • Share API keys or commit them to git
Do:
  • Group related documents logically
  • Ask specific, clear questions
  • Verify low-confidence answers with sources
  • Use text-based documents when possible
  • Reuse chats for related conversations
  • Regularly clean up unused resources
  • Use environment variables for API keys

Complete Production Example

Next Steps

Examples

Production-ready code examples

RAG Optimization Guide

Advanced optimization techniques