Problem doing first meteor deploy in production with nginx

I have tried to distill my build into the smallest use case, and it
is hanging right now. I was able to connect to my site when I was using
nginx and the regular development version of meteor (launched with
meteor command). I was planning on wrapping my build commands in an
upstart service, but for now I just have them in a shell script for
testing below.

export MONGO_URL=mongodb://localhost:27017/takecloudnotes
export ROOT_URL=https://takecloudnotes.com
node main.js

My environment basically consists of
nginx box forwarding to my meteor box
meteor box is running mongo and the meteor server
both boxes on ubuntu 14.04

This is my first meteor deploy and I feel like I am shooting blindly.
I started trying to modify my mongo url and root url but am having no
luck. When I execute the script it just hangs with no response so I
don’t have any feedback to help me analyze the problem. I will be happy
to answer any questions regarding my environment. Thanks.

I suggest you take a look at mup for deployments. I use this in combination with nginx without any problems. It also creates a service so you can easily start/stop your app.