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Depending on longer term goals, I might consider React (with Flux), virtual-dom, or Polymer (for Web Component polyfills).
On the backend, I would likely go with Node.js, largely due to JS being my forte.
1. couchdb: it was the obvious choice for me one because I know it well and second because it is document oriented. Most of my data is JSON representation of real world documents like the rent contract, the monthly bills dues etc. And lastly because I feel that couchdb is an excellent server side JavaScript environment. I am using it to render templates, validate data and even for user accounts management. Lots of easy wins for me there. Plus who knows I may decide to add an offline component to my app in the future :)
2. Openresty: I discovered openresty from a hacker news thread (thank you HN :-). I already used nginx but I was a bit frustrated with it when I could not do some slightly complex things. Couchdb has an http api and I just needed some tiny bit of scripting to make it suitable for my application. I think that openresty + couchcdb/elasticsearch/oritentdb/ any database with an http api is a great combo.
3. Jquery: old and faithful. I have worked with knockout in the past and while I really like it I feel much more productive with jquery.
4. simple grid: a very small css grid framework. If I need anything else I just extract it from twitter bootstrap. For example I extracted table styles from it when I couldn't get my tables to look as good. It works well for me.
I use a custom MVC framework, comprised of small OSS components that each do their job well: GluePHP for routing, PHP-ActiveRecord for an ORM, and either Savant3 or Handlebars for templates.
The prospect of learning an elaborate framework for something I could piece together myself seems like a waste of time, plus none of them seem to last when it comes to relevance.
I've also heard good things about Foundation (https://github.com/zurb/foundation) for getting things mobile/responsive out the box.
For actual html5 mobile apps -- ionic (https://github.com/driftyco/ionic)
For launch/revenue: C# since it's what I'm most familiar with
Database: Postgres
As the leading relational database, Postgres is a significant human achievement. It has recuperated most of NoSQL's critique in the past few years (for 99% of use cases), with the JSON types and functions, WITH RECURSIVE queries (added a few years ago, which essentially let you do anything you could do with a graph database), columnar stores, etc.
Its full-text search is good enough for many cases. [1]
Backend: Flask, SQLAlchemy, Flask-Restless (REST API framework)
There's no other ORM that's as powerful and uncompromising as SQLAlchemy.
If you use Flask-Restless to generate a REST API, you can have almost your entire app consist simply of model definitions.
Frontend JS: React with the Fluxbone pattern [2]
React is the most performant, powerful, and practical frontend framework currently available, and it's likely to be the best choice for practical development for the forseeable future.
CSS: Titon Toolkit [3]
A nice up-and-coming lightweight CSS framework with lots of components and plugins that gets out of your way. Some work is needed to integrate it with React while maintaining the Virtual DOM performance benefits of React, though.
[1] http://blog.lostpropertyhq.com/postgres-full-text-search-is-...
[2] http://www.toptal.com/front-end/simple-data-flow-in-react-ap...
Already building one on Laravel 4.x and React for the front-end. Have a background with Django and my personal favorite Pyramid but Laravel really cuts down the boilerplate for me.