Very inspiring case!
I've been wondering about self-votes since the time I arrived on Steemit. Right when I was going to publish my first post, I came across the option on the editor to vote on my post automatically, and found it very strange... I had assumed the post's rewards were supposed to represent the worth that other people give to my post, and self-voting didn't feel right to me. Then, I read the "If not even I find value in my own content, then why should others?" argument, and self-voted a couple of times to see what would happen, but I stopped as I think a single upvote worth $0.003 something doesn't make any difference. Since then, my very few self-votes have been accidental, because I'm following a curation trail that supports newbies by upvoting its members' posts, and sometimes it'd cause my account to vote on my own post, and I didn't bother to remove my votes because this wouldn't give my VP back.
I noticed that in other comments you are recommending new users to self-vote to build SP, but in my case I still think it wouldn't make any difference (I'd rather give the vote to someone else, even if only to show support since the value is negligible). Or do you mean self-voting right after publishing the post to get a chunk of the curation rewards too?