About the Author: Eve Peters is the Founder and CEO of MIXTT, a social site that provides young urban singles with a fun, casual, and natural alternative to traditional online dating. Find out more through the company blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

In August of 2007, I decided I wanted to build a hybrid social networking/ group dating Website. Having neglected to take even one Computer Science course in college, I embarked on this adventure relatively ill-prepared. Here are my three biggest lessons learned from the experience, and my advice to all fellow non-techy entrepreneurs:

1. Partner with a techy
2. Move or outsource to Argentina (or Ukraine or India)
3. Educate yourself

1. Partner with a techy: You can get away with part of your founding team being more business-side than tech-side, but not your whole team. If every line of code has to be generated by a paid employee or contractor, you’re going to burn through your precious (and typically scarce) savings/ seed funding at a frightening pace. Build a team that can begin creating the service or product for little more than their own sweat. This will also help you when you’re raising money, as half of the investors you’ll go after are likely techies or former techies themselves. They’ll have much more trust, respect, and empathy for a founding team that shows it understands the critical importance of tech talent at its core.

2. Move or outsource to Argentina (or Ukraine or India): If you have little to work with from the get-go, consider starting your business in some place other than one of the top three most expensive cities in the U.S. There is a common misconception that you can’t do anything legitimate without paying a Stanford or MIT-born engineer the equivalent of four private school tuitions per year. It isn’t so. If you are precise in your specs (functional and design) and create good wireframes, you can go far with outsourced talent. True, foreign teams present certain challenges – language barriers, time differences, inevitable misunderstandings, etc. – but if you structure your contracts right, there will be just as much responsibility and accountability with them as you would have enjoyed with a local resource.

3. Educate yourself: It’s one thing not to be able to write code, but it’s quite another not to understand what code is. If you’re still in college, take a couple introductory Computer Science courses. Now. If you’re already starting your company, learn as much as you can from your engineers. Sit with them for a few hours. Learn what gets stored in which folder; the difference between a language and a framework; the sequence of actions that have to happen to make a certain button work; the meaning of SVN, PHP, LAMP, AJAX, MySQL and another few dozen acronyms; what they mean when they talk about “architecture”; how your server is set up . . . try to expose yourself along the way so that you’re not a deer in the headlights when you get asked about the fundamental tech specs of your product. This is important not only for the sake of appearing in the know, but also (and more importantly) for the sake engaging with your dev team.

What’s your advice for non-techy Entrepreneurs?

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