Seattle's Smartsheet has Viagra moment

Last month Bellevue-based Smartsheet.com, a SaaS-based work management tool, announced the completion of a $1.25 Million Series B round of financing led by the Madrona Venture Group and Founder Brent Frei.  In less than 3 years, Smartsheet registered over 65,000 users across more than 30 countries. The January round of investment will enable them to continue to expand their outreach and dedicate resources to continued development of the product.

Earlier today, John Cook of TechFlash wrote about Smartsheet.com's recent success in rolling out a new feature called Smartsourcing to Amazon Mechanical Turk. Smartsourcing lets companies collaborating on projects outsource simple tasks and Smartsheet's Frei explained the new feature in a blog post yesterday titled Smartsheet's Viagra Moment.

Remember the story of Sildenafil Citrate (Viagra)? It was being developed as a possible hypertension drug – but showed compelling side effects for a then uncontested market – Erectile Dysfunction. While not identified in our initial business strategy, we too experienced a compelling side effect from the unique design of our service. Turns out, Smartsheet works really well for managing virtual workers at the very granular task level. Virtually everyone’s first sentence after being shown this new capability in our product has been, “Can I try it?”

And so, from today onward everyone can try it. We’ve released the first global switchboard that connects real and virtual teams on an as-needed basis to accomplish specific tasks. It’s called Smartsourcing, and it’s powered by Amazon Mechanical Turk. Smartsheet is the only service on the web to combine crowdsourcing seamlessly into your project management. We’ve added over 100,000 employees to everyone’s team roster.

Check out the video screencast on Smartsourcing. In today's ecomony, there's no doubt On Demand Workforce tools like Smartsheet's Smartsourcing will be a hit with businesses on a budget and thousands of workers on the web.