Ryan Carson on TechCrunch wrote a great run-through on monetizing your web application yesterday. It’s chock full of useful, high level information on topics relating to figuring out who your target audience will be, determining how you make money, examining traditional options for pulling in the green, and so forth. If you have thoughts of building the next big thing (be it the next SFA or Google Maps or whatever), this is probably a good starting point.

Ryan’s article certainly won’t give you all the answers, but it should prompt some interesting questions that you should be asking yourself before quitting your day job.

You should never plan on being acquired. Remember that getting bought for $1.65B (or even $5M) just isn’t likely for 99.9% of web apps. Profitability should be your #1 goal.

You need to have a viable and serious plan for profitability. If you get acquired, great. Just don’t plan on it.