MKK Lion Blog

Welcome to the first page of the MKK Lion Blog.

The plan is to post every day; my thoughts, my day, interesting news, events, activities and photos, etc, about MKK Lion and its associated businesses.

Over the last three years, I have been creating online shops and businesses in my free time, to attain the holy grail of having profitable side-hustles.  My ultimate goal is to replace the 9-to-5 job with these online businesses and concentrate on them completely.

• MKK Lion
  • www.mkklion.com
  • MKK Lion is a clothing and accessories website, for my own “MKK Lion” brand.  
  • We sell tops, bottoms, dresses, sports gear, flip-flops and sliders, bags and jackets.
  • We have over 3,000 product variants available with the “MKK Lion” brand.

• MKK Hats is a sub-set of MKK Lion.
  • www.mkkhats.com
  • Where MKK Lion keeps to a strict set of design rules using the MKK Lion logo, MKK Hats is much more relaxed.
  • Any design can be put onto a hat (baseball cap, beanie, snapback and trucker hat), uploaded to the website and immediately available to buy.
  • We have over 3,000 hats to choose from at present.

• MKK T-shirts is similar to hats.
  • www.mkktshirts.com
  • Freedom to put any design onto a t-shirt, hoodie, sweatshirt and long-sleeved shirt.  
  • This site is still in progress, putting designs onto clothing as quickly as I can, then uploading them onto the shop.  I wish Shopify had a bulk upload tool, but it does not, so I have to add thousand’s of products one at a time.
  • By the end of April 2026, we will have around 3,000 t-shirts and tops available to buy

• Tjita Cosmetics is coming Summer 2026.
  • www.tjitacosmetics.com
  • My step-daughter and I want to create our own brand of cosmetics and sell them online. 
  • She is the face and heart of this business. It was her idea, so we named it after her. 
  • We think a 17-year-old woman, owning, designing and running her own cosmetics brand, is going to be attractive to other young women around the world.  Her old step-dad will be strictly behind the scenes doing the IT, process automation and project management. This is going to be her business.

• MKK Racing is a horse racing lay betting system
  • www.patreon.com/mkkracing
  • Something I thought up during COVID in 2020, thinking of ways to create a side-hustle that was light on effort but would earn money. 
  • I worked for a retail and online gambling company from 2011-2013, performing a variety of IT jobs. They made a lot of money and it taught me that successfully trying to beat bookmakers is really hard to do, and they make lots of money. 
  • Then the euruka moment – “don’t try to beat the bookies, copy them”! 
  • I don’t have the funds or resources to start my own gambling website, but what if I could write an algorithm that would select horses with a high probability of losing. I could then lay those horses on a betting exchange, ‘almost’ copying how bookmakers work (they lay everything because they can control the price. I cannot control the price, so I have to be smarter and pick horses that I think will lose).  
  • I know very little about horses, but I do know about Microsoft Excel and statistics, so I made a model that imports the daily races and chooses horses to lay (that we want to lose) using alogrithms based on maths and probability. I don’t care what colour the horse is, who the jockey is, which training yard it comes from, what colour the horse is, what it had for breakfast. My model is pure maths. Zero emotion. Think of it more like investing than gambling.  Gambling to me suggests an emotional thought and decision. My model exclude emotion. It picks horses to lay, based on maths.  
  • So, I made the model, ran it in theory for a number of months, fine-tuning it, tweaking it. I got it to make an average 1% daily return. So I ran it with real money. Again, it made on average 1% a day. 
  • As the bank balance went up, the amount I risked went up. This meant the returns would be exponential if I just let the profits run. All was going well, but I got made redundant in 2024 and as much as I wanted to keep the gambling going, I needed the money to pay bills.  
  • I came back to it on 1st January 2026. Starting with the same model, but this time I was able to run 150,000 horse racing results through ChatGPT, asking it to analyse the data and tell me the best criteria to use to predict which horses would lose with the greatest predictability. ChatGPT’s answers were very close to my own through trial and error. I took six months. ChatGPT took 3 minutes to get the same answer.  
  • I did ask ChatGPT to analyse the same 150,000 horse racing results but this time to create selection criteria would generate the highest probability of picking winners. Again, in under 3 minutes it told me how to filter a day’s racing to pick horses to back.  Dismal failure.  ChatGPT cannot predict race winners yet, but it is good at creating selection criteria to choose horses with a high probability of losing. I use this data every day and gamble my own money. 
  • So far, in 3 months, £750 has almost become £1,100 – a 46% return. Try asking your bank or ISA to make 46% is 3 months – and February was flat – complete waste of effort, so all the profit has come in January and March 2026.  
  • I then got another brainwave. I produce this daily information, perhaps the information has value, so I setup a page on Patreon, where I offer the information to subscribers for just £10+VAT/month, sharing exactly the same selections that I use myself.  Imagine if I got 1,000 subscribers. That would be £10,000+VAT every month before tax. That’s a good side hustle for very little extra work.

• MKK Books is where I write books.
  • I enjoy writing and started with a story about the first year on my dog’s life in 2014. A naughty Shih Tzu called Bella, chronicling all the things she got unto. It’s a report on what she did, rather than fiction. You can find it on Amazon, “Diary of a Little Dog“.  I turned the book into a series of picture books for kids to enjoy with great images of Bella, showing as well as writing what she did. It’s amazing what AI can produce when you ask it to made images for you. Sadly Bella died aged 11 in 2025, but I will always have those memories on how she was an inquisitive and mischievous puppy in 2014.  
  • I have since written some more books. I enjoy history and factual books more than fiction, but writing has taken a back seat to producing and stocking the websites above.  I will come back to writing one day, when I have the time again.