Smartsheet is embracing the power of the crowd. The Bellevue startup, which makes an online project management tool for businesses, is rolling out a new feature called Smartsourcing that lets companies collaborating on projects outsource simple tasks to Amazon Mechanical Turk. Founder Brent Frei explains the new feature in an amusing blog post titled "Smartsheet's Viagra Moment."

Frei was referring to the fact that researchers originally developed the Viagra drug for treatment of hypertension, but discovered it had another compelling side effect. Smartsheet was developed for online project management but has a side effect of its own -- it "works really well for managing virtual workers at the very granular task level," Frei said.

Amazon Mechanical Turk, one of Amazon's growing array of web services, lets developers and businesses outsource simple tasks to workers for a small fee. Frei said businesses using Smartsheet's collaboration tool can outsource things like simple internet research, editing, spellchecking or transcribing voice notes to text. Here's Smartsheet's demo of how it works.

Smartsheet, which is backed by Madrona Venture Group, recently pulled in $1.25 million in new funding.